THE FLY ROOM is a feature film about the life of noted biologist Calvin Bridges, as seen through his daughter's eyes.

THE FLY ROOM will be screened at Dasheri on 10^th August from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.

The film is based on the true story of Betsey Bridges, a ten year old girl who discovers the scary world of science by visits to a laboratory called THE FLY ROOM. Over many visits she develops a keen interest in science and begins to bond with her father. The movie stars ten-year-old Zoe Brooks as Betsey Bridges.

Director Alexis Gambis recalls: "I first learned about the Fly Room laboratory during a genetics seminar in graduate school. The boys in the lab, supervised by Thomas Hunt Morgan, worked on fruit flies and were the main forces behind the birth of modern genetics. My attention was caught by Calvin Bridges, a James Dean-flavored scientist whose quest for genetic answers clouded his ability to connect emotionally. While I was researching this historical era of science, I started my own research on fruit flies. A few years into my PhD, I serendipitously met Betsey, the 95-year old daughter of Calvin Bridges.

The Fly Room feature was born from a series of conversations with Betsey. After telling her about my work on flies, she opened up about her relationship with her father. I was compelled by the intimate tragedy of a little girl trying to decipher her father while he was simultaneously trying to decipher the genetic code. Her stories are charged with emotion and provide a complex view of her father and his scientific world."

The movie is interesting in several aspects. The Drosophila research community owes much to "THE FLY ROOM" at Columbia University where important and conclusive discoveries were made, that completely changed our outlook on how genes are organized within chromosomes.   Drosophila melanogaster was essentially built as a model organism in "THE FLY ROOM" and systematic genetic and physical maps of the fly chromosomes were created.

This film, however, is not only a window to the day to day happenings in "THE FLY ROOM" that led to important discoveries, but also a glimpse of an era where scientific passions overrode the social and personal lives of many scientists. Despite those passionate scientific pursuits, "THE FLY ROOM" set the precedent of the generosity and exchange that the Drosophila scientists enjoy till date.

About the film: Details at http://www.theflyroom.com/

With contributions from Deepti Trivedi and Aditya Padinjat (editing)