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| The Singularity is Near, A True Story About the Future Documentary Film by Inventor, Futurist Ray Kurzweil Makes International Premiere at the Montreal World Film Festival on August 31 | |
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| | August 16, 2010 (BOSTON) -- "The Singularity is Near, A True Story About the Future," by filmmakers Anthony Waller, Ray Kurzweil, Ehren Koepf and Toshi Hoo, with Executive Producer Martine Rothblatt (Terasem Motion InfoCulture), makes its international premiere on Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at the 34th annual Montreal World Film Festival. A Q&A session with Ray Kurzweil and Martine Rothblatt will immediately follow the screening. The film is among 61 films competing in the Documentaries of the World category at the 12 day festival. | | |
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|  ABOUT THE FILM
The feature-length documentary film presents the daring arguments from Kurzweil's New York Times bestselling book, "The Singularity is Near." He predicts that with the ever-accelerating rate of technological change, humanity is fast approaching an era in which our intelligence will become trillions of times more powerful and increasingly merged with computers. This will be the dawning of a new civilization, enabling us to transcend our biological limitations. In Kurzweil's post-biological world, boundaries blur between human and machine, real and virtual. Human aging and illness are reversed, world hunger and poverty are solved, and we cure death. He maintains a radically optimistic view of the future course of human development while acknowledging profound new dangers. "Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future," according to Bill Gates. "Kurzweil envisions a future in which information technologies have advanced so far and fast that they enable humanity to transcend its biological limitations --transforming our lives in ways we can't yet imagine."  Kurzweil examines the social and philosophical implications of these profound changes and the potential threats they pose to human civilization in dialogues with big thinkers, including former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke; technologists Bill Joy, Mitch Kapor, Marvin Minsky, Eric Drexler, Sherry Turkle and Cynthia Breazeal; Future Shock author Alvin Toffler; civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz; venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and environmentalist Bill McKibben. Kurzweil illustrates the future with a narrative story about an "AI" seeking her human rights, featuring popular NCIS actress Pauley Perrette and personal development guru Tony Robbins. The movie, The Singularity Is Near offers a view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.
For more information about the film visit: Singularity.com/themovie
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| | MONTREAL WORLD FILM FESTIVAL PREMIERE SCREENING
The Singularity is Near will premiere Tuesday, August 31, 7:30 p.m. at the Cineplex Odeon Quartier Latin, 350 Rue Emery Street, Montreal, QC, H2X 1J2. A Q&A session with Ray Kurzweil and Martine Rothblatt will immediately follow the screening.
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| TICKETS AND PASSES
Passes to festival screenings are available online now at ffm-montreal.org. Tickets to individual screenings will go on sale August 21. For more information: ffm-montreal.org. | | |
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| | ABOUT THE MONTREAL WORLD FILM FESTIVAL The mission of the Montreal World Film Festival is to encourage cultural diversity and understanding among nations, to foster the cinema of all continents by stimulating the development of quality cinema, to promote filmmakers and innovative works, to discover and encourage new talents, and to promote meetings between cinema professionals from around the world. Every year, films from more than seventy countries, including well-known and first-time filmmakers alike, are selected. For more information: ffm-montreal.org. | | ABOUT RAY KURZWEIL
Inventor Ray Kurzweil is one of the world's leading futurists, with a 20-year track record of accurate predictions. Called the "restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes magazine, Kurzweil was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison." Inventor of the first CCD flat bed scanner and many other firsts, Kurzweil is an inductee in the National Inventors Hall of Fame and recipient of the National Medal of Technology, the Lemelson-MIT Prize (the world's largest for innovation), and 19 honorary doctorates and awards from three U.S. presidents. | | | ABOUT MARTINE ROTHBLATT & TERASEM MOTION INFOCULTURE
Martine Rothblatt, J.D. Ph.D. started the satellite vehicle tracking and satellite radio industries and is the Chairman of United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland. Dr. Rothblatt founded Terasem Motion InfoCulture with a mission to create exciting media products on the themes of diversity, unity and joyful techno-immortality. This includes films, DVDs, webcasts, and CDs, among other formats. For more information: teraseminfoculture.com. | | | |
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