Ensemble Film Foundation

Ninety minutes from now, Hannah has to present a plan to exterminate and dispose of millions of bodies. But as she works through the brief, the massive humanitarian implications force her to question: is this hypothetical, a test, or the real thing — and what lengths will she go to protect her career, her co-workers, her life, and humanity itself.

Based on the award-winning play, the feature-length film Ideation follows “the smartest people in the room” as Hannah and her team struggle with just doing their job as they reckon with their own moral boundaries.

Social Relevance: morality in the modern era, speaking truth to power, humanism.

Sammy is a brilliant and precocious mixed-race kid living on the south-side of Chicago. He’s being raised by his dad, John, a cabbie who is struggling to make ends meet, and Uncle Kareem, a security guard at the local community college.

Although there’s lots of love there, they cannot ultimately meet Sammy’s nagging desire to figure out who he is. In this feature-length film, a chance meeting in John’s cab with Nicole, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium, leads Sammy down a path of self-discovery.

Social Relevance: Race in America, fatherhood and family, science education.