SHADOWS IN SUNLIGHT was made possible through a collaboration between Nobel Prize Outreach and Grain Media, with support from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, an independent Danish enterprise foundation that supports scientific, humanitarian and social causes.
The film is inspired by the legacy of John Franklin Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller and Frederick Chapman Robbins, who were awarded jointly the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of the ability of poliomyelitis viruses to grow in cultures of various types of tissue. In 1941, Enders, Robbins and Weller succeeded in culturing the virus that causes polio in human muscle and tissue in a laboratory setting. This became an important step on the road toward a vaccine against polio.
It is in the spirit of this legacy that courageous women like Ishrat and many others take to the streets, risking their own safety to vaccinate young children in their communities. Nobel Prize Outreach’s mission is to inspire change guided by Alfred Nobel’s vision to work “for the greatest benefit to humankind”. They do this by developing ambitious national and international outreach activities to disseminate knowledge on Nobel Prize-awarded achievements and to engage and inspire people to tackle the greatest challenges of our times, through various creative initiatives, which includes their support of documentaries.