Bluebrain: a documentary film

What is Bluebrain?

Bluebrain is a ten-year documentary film-in-the-making about the twenty-first century race to reverse engineer the human brain. Such is the goal of The Blue Brain Project, based in Lausanne, Switzerland, one of the highest-profile neuroscience projects in the world today. Blue Brain’s audacious leader is Henry Markram, who publicly announced in 2009 that he seeks to reverse-engineer a human brain with digital simulations of all the physical properties of every neuron, powered by IBM supercomputers, by 2020. Director Noah Hutton began shooting in 2009, focusing exclusively on Markram's Blue Brain Project-- but starting in Year 3, the scope of the film has expanded to include the work of other prominent projects and labs seeking to understand the brain through different methods, including Sebastian Seung of M.I.T., Rafael Yuste of Columbia University, and Jeff Lichtman of Harvard University.

The film will continue to survey the work of other projects and their leaders in years to come, with yearly shorts released ahead of a full re-edit into a documentary feature due for completion in 2020. As the Blue Brain simulation is built over the course of this decade, so too will this documentary about a historic quest in human history. Through yearly updates from Blue Brain and other prominent scientists, philosophers, and ethicists, Bluebrain will track a crucial decade in the human mind’s relentless drive to understand itself. To stay up-to-date with the project, please visit our Contact page to sign up for our newsletter.

About the Filmmaker

Noah Hutton got his start as a director in 2009 with Crude Independence, a documentary feature about a small town in North Dakota in the midst of a major oil boom. The film premiered at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival and won Best Documentary Feature at the 2009 Oxford Film Festival. In 2010, Noah directed the documentary feature More to Live For, commissioned by the global cancer foundation Love Hope Strength, which played at over twenty festival across the U.S. (Woodstock, Cleveland International, Dallas International) and was released by Cinetic in 2012. His 2012 concert film King for Two Days, which premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, is a portrait of jazz drummer Dave King (The Bad Plus).

Noah has directed commercial content and music videos through his NYC-based production company Couple 3 Films, including videos for The Indecent (Warner Brothers) and the The Bad Plus (Universal/E1). In 2011, he wrote, directed, and scored 30 short films about the human mind for Scientific American. Noah is a graduate of Wesleyan University, where he studied art history and neuroscience, and founder of the website The Beautiful Brain.

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What is Bluebrain?

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