IFFBoston Highlight: Unraveling a Local Genius

A man with a self-made peg-leg, wearing a yellow raincoat and pants, washes dishes in return for beer at the Plough & Stars in Cambridge. He has also re-written DNA code and created an aircraft through electrically-powered frog legs.

Joe Davis, the indefinable character, may have remained an enigma if not for “Heaven+Earth+Joe Davis,” the intimate documentary on this pioneer of science and art.

Writer/Director Peter Sasowsky presents audiences with a collage of family and peer interviews and childhood video footage thoughtfully laced into a visual diary of Joe at work in his research labs and art studios. A man who literally muscled his way into MIT as an unpaid research affiliate and lecturer continues that role today - some 20 years later. A local academic celebrity, Joe is known by most as a genius and by others as a mentally unstable art-inventor.

“Many people don’t understand much of what I have to say,” Davis said in a recent interview. “When they do, they usually don’t believe me.”

Davis, who holds no advanced academic degrees, can be linked to dozens of nationally and internationally renowned projects and experiments including a real-life time machine and DNA coded with algorithms once used to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence. His art exhibitions, often controversial, range from the audio beats of microorganisms to various sculptures including “Galaxy” in Cambridge's Kendall Square.

Sasowsky’s film offers an unbiased view inside the eccentric brain behind such ideas – without becoming lost in their complexities.

“My goal was to find a way to retain the poetic moments and philosophical conclusions, with as little encroachment as possible,” said Director Peter Sasowsky. “A documentary is one of those few forms where we are allowed to be expansive in our thinking – it’s a terrible waste not to do so.”

In May 2010, after the film's completion, Joe Davis was offered a research position in the famed George Church lab in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School - one that was unpaid. It's another ironic accomplishment for this prolific mind whose work is respected by the highest institutions, but only half-way. As the film proves, Davis pushes through these obstacles, never losing sight of his goals.

“Like the fado music,” Davis said, “life can sometimes be difficult or painful, and exquisitely beautiful nonetheless.”

“Heaven+Earth+Joe Davis” is still in the film festival circuit. Follow the film on Facebook and check the official site for updates on its release.