In 2020, the FFC screened the German-Polish-British co-production THE ADVENTURES OF A MATHEMATICIAN. Thor Klein's feature film about the Polish-Jewish mathematician Stanislav Ulam, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1938 and was instrumental in developing the atomic bomb program there, was awarded the "Cottbus-ins-Kino" prize in 2020 for promoting the distribution of a film from the FFC program.
Now the Filmwelt distribution agency is releasing the film, which was partly shot in the Cottbus area - where the Los Alamos research site was recreated. In Los Alamos, Ulam and his colleagues developed their weapon in the 1940s under the title of the "Manhattan Project" to build up a threat against the expansion plans of Nazi Germany and later the Soviet Union. The impressive feature film is based on Ulam's biography. It grapples with the ethical conflict of developing a weapon of mass destruction to deter an inhumane system that would, and later did, bring unimaginable destruction and suffering to humanity when used. Against the backdrop of Russia's war of aggression on Ukraine and the question of the moral obligation or escalation potential of arms deliveries, Ulam's reflections take on unexpected relevance today.
The cinema premiere of THE ADVENTURES OF A MATHEMATIC will take place on 29.6. at 20:00 in Berlin's Kant-Kino, followed by a discussion with Jürgen Trittin (member of the Bundestag for Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), the president of the Deutsche Gesellschafft für Osteuropakunde, Ruprecht Polenz, and the director Thor Klein.