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TUESDAY DECEMBER 11, 2018
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Rutgers professor’s award-winning documentary airs nationwide on PBS JAKE MCGOWAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Thomas Lennon, an Academy Award-winning director and head of the Documentary Film Lab at the Rutgers Filmmaking Center, had more than 40 filmmaking teams contribute to the film. RUTGERS.EDU
“Sacred,” a documentary film originally released in 2016, is set to air nationwide on Dec. 10 at 10 p.m. on PBS. Academy Award-winning director Thomas Lennon, who is in charge of the Documentary Film Lab at the Rutgers Filmmaking Center, directed the film. “Sacred” explores the role of prayer and ritual in daily life. The film focuses on depicting faith demonstrations worldwide, including religious functions, ceremonies and rites of passage.
Lennon collaborated with more than 40 filmmaking teams around the world to complete the film. “Sacred” premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2016, and has been screened at more than 25 international festivals. Lennon commissioned or sourced footage from top independent filmmakers from more than 25 countries, with each filmmaking team contributing a single scene, according to PBS. Lennon did not choose the project. Instead, he was assigned it. WNET THIRTEEN, a public television station in New York City,
approached him with the project. The documentar y is told without narration, features no experts and has no words at all for long stretches of the movie, according to PBS. While most documentar y directors physically go to the sites that they are filming, Lennon approached his film from a dif ferent angle. “The challenge that I posed to myself was: would it be possible to make a sweeping, global documentary and never leave my office in SEE DOCUMENTARY ON PAGE 4
The film covers many religions from all over the world, encapsulating diversity and traditions. Lennon used the web to find filmmakers in different countries to document their region. YOUTUBE
Researchers find way to transform gases into plastic LEONARD TAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Rutgers researchers have managed to turn carbon dioxide into plastic, fabrics, resins and other products. The original purpose of the study was to determine if certain liquid compounds could lower the energy needed to start the reaction, said Karin Calvinho, a chemistr y doctoral student in the Department of Chemistr y and Chemical Biology and lead author of the study. Calvinho and the researchers had discovered that these compounds are good at converting carbon dioxide into single molecules called monomers, which are
the building blocks of larger, more complicated molecular structures. Plastics made from this process are direct substitutes of plastics currently in the market, causing their strength and flexibility to be the same. But what this process offers is an alternative to pollutant-emitting processes that have dominated the creation of plastics for some time. Carbon dioxide for this process can potentially be gathered from ambient air, flue gas or smoke that comes out of factor y plants, Calvinho said. The process starts with a carbon dioxide source and is dissolved SEE PLASTIC ON PAGE 4
Karin Calvinho, a chemistry doctoral student in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and lead author of the study, was part of the research group that discovered the chemical compounds that are efficient at splitting carbon dioxide into single molecules. RUTGERS.EDU
VOLUME 150, ISSUE 120 • UNIVERSITY ... 3 • OPINIONS ... 6 • INSIDE BEAT... 10 • DIVERSIONS ... 11 • SPORTS ... BACK