Official Website and Trailer Available

The feature film debut of renowned opera and theater director Chen Shi-Zheng, DARK MATTER delves into the world of Liu Xing (Chinese for “Shooting Star”), a Chinese science student pursuing a Ph.D in the US in the early 1990s. Driven by ambition, yet unable to navigate academic politics, Liu Xing is inexorably pushed to the margins of American life, until he loses his way.

Liu Xing (Liu Ye) arrives at a big Western university with plans to study the origins of the universe. In the beginning, everything is looking up. He finds other Chinese students to share a cheap apartment with him, and flirts with an attractive American girl who works in a local tea shop. When the head of the department, Jacob Reiser (Aidan Quinn), welcomes Liu Xing into his select cosmology group, it seems that only hard work stands between him and a bright future in American science. At an orientation for foreigners sponsored by a local church, Joanna Silver (Meryl Streep), a wealthy patron of the university, notices the earnest student. An unspoken bond forms between them.

Liu Xing becomes Reiser’s protégé, accompanying him to a prestigious conference where he makes an impressive debut. He is drawn to the study of dark matter, an unseen substance that shapes the universe, but it soon becomes clear that his developing theories threaten the Reiser Model. Excited by the possibility of a breakthrough, Liu Xing is deaf to warnings that he must first pay his dues. Soon he is eclipsed within the department by Laurence, a more dutiful Chinese student, and is forced to go behind Reiser’s back to publish his discoveries. When the article draws ire instead of accolades, Liu Xing turns to Joanna, who naively encouarges him on his collision course.

Liu Xing clings to the idea of America science as a free market of ideas, and American society as wide open to immigrants. But in the end, his dissertation is rejected, and the girl in the tea shop brushes him off. His roommates find job, leaving him behind. Too proud to accept help from Joanna, and unwilling to return home to his parents, Liu Xing becomes a ghost-like presence in the university. Left alone with his shattered dreams, he explodes in a final act of violence.

Inspired by a real event, DARK MATTER has a screenplay by Billy Shebar and a story by Chen Shi-Zheng and Billy Shebar. The film was financed by American Sterling Productions and produced by Janet Yang of American Sterling Productions and Mary Salter and Andrea Miller of Saltmill LLC. Kirk D’Amico and Linda Chiu are executive producers.

Words from the scriptwriter:

With Weinberg’s help, I worked out a scenario in which Professor Reiser (Aidan Quinn) has a theory of the early universe based on “cosmic strings”, rubber-band like structures that seed the growth of galaxies. He puts his grad students to work writing endless pages of computer code to test his theory in a simulated universe represented by dots on the screen. But it’s not working. His results don’t match the latest data coming in from the observatories. Reiser’s theory predicts that galaxies are everywhere; the astronomers are finding vast stretches of the universe that are completely empty.

Liu Xing works hard for Reiser, but can’t help but see flaws in his model. In the symposium scene, he demonstrates that by changing Reiser’s assumptions about dark matter, he can get better results. Later he even questions Reiser’s cosmic string theory. Against his advisor’s wishes he uses a new theoretical framework, superstrings, to predict the existence of a dark matter particle that will better explain the structure of the universe. Threatened by his student’s ambitious research, Reiser rejects him in favor of the more dutiful Laurence, another capable Chinese student, but one with a much better grasp of academic politics.

Since the death of our fictional character in 1992, the quest to understand dark matter has continued. A recent collision of two galaxy clusters gave astronomers their first glimpse of the dark matter halos surrounding them. Large-scale observations like this, and very small-scale experiments done with particle accelerators, may one day help scientists finally discover the composition of dark matter. If the dark matter particle predicted by Liu Xing turns out to be the real dark matter present in the universe, then he could become the first fictional character to win a Nobel Prize.

- Billy Shebar

Great trailer...got a little chill at the end of it.