Science Fair
Perhaps you went to a neighborhood school where the average student’s highest academic aspiration was to shake hands with the principal, tuck that rolled-up diploma under one arm and walk off the stage to find a place in the workforce, helping to feed a family, pay the rent or perhaps grow a business that could someday finance a family trip to Disneyland.
Or perhaps you went to a magnet school alongside the smarty-pants kid who’d impressed every teacher since kindergarten, who had aced every admission test in every institution, aiming to sharpen her intellect in a top-notch school where students breathe only rarefied air.
Most likely your own experiences were somewhere in the middle. And most likely in either case, at some time or other, you knew the kids in “Science Fair,” directors Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster’s National Geographic documentary about the participants in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
These particular contestants are science whizzes, but they could have been athletes, band members or fledgling writers of haiku. The questions they express in the particular milieu of the documentary — have I adequately explained myself ? Have I considered the results of what could go right and what could go wrong? Am I an unrecognized star, better than everyone else, or the rotten apple that somehow has found its way to the top of the barrel? — are secondary to the profound question shared by every adolescent, whether geek or cheerleader: What’s going to become of my life?
The movie follows nine students and a teacher as they make their way through individual finals that lead to the annual ISEF competition in Los Angeles. They represent a variety of personalities, introverted and extroverted, supremely self-confident and shy, and of course — although most adults are happy to find that this concept disappears as adolescence wanes — popular and unpopular. “The better you are at science fair,” says Harsha, a Kentucky student who’s been working with two others on creating a new kind of stethoscope, “the worse you are at dancing.”
You feel you get to know each of the competitors as they make their way through the lead-up, and then through the fair to the awards ceremony. I was most taken by Kashfia, a South Dakota girl who wears a Muslim hijab, who is shy but bold enough to say she feels like an outsider in her school. “I’m not cool like them,” she tells the documentarians. “I’m not popular like them. … I feel like I have to be extra nice and smile at people on the street so I seem unharmful.”
When Kashfia fails in enlisting the help of a science teacher to sponsor her entry, she turns to the football coach, who admittedly knows little about science but agrees to support her. Had this been a made-forDisney movie, it would end in her triumph, the football team carrying her off the field on their shoulders. I’m not going to provide a spoiler, but that’s not exactly the denouement. Her story ends with the revelation that she was bound for Harvard after high school, and that should leave watchers with a smile that she’s off to the majors. It’s not that easy, though.
The movie is 90 minutes long, with a simple structure, moving among its subjects at a deliberate pace. As it focuses on each student, and then comes back again, you’re apt to get a little impatient, longing for the results. I’m thinking this was a purposeful tactic of the filmmakers, intended to enhance the drama.
By qualifying for the grand contest, “you’ve already won,” someone tells the young scientists as they arrive at the competition. The competitors are sophisticated enough to know this is not enough for them, for their parents and for their teachers. It’s particularly not enough for one particularly articulate girl, a repeat competitor who looks into the camera and says that she knows she’s smarter than everybody.
Didn’t you sit next to her in trigonometry?