Glenlyon Norfolk School will dim the lights Thursday night for a story that’s been two decades in the making, and for Victoria filmmaker Niobe Thompson, it feels a bit like bringing a long, winding journey back home.
Thompson will be at the school in the Victoria suburb of Oak Bay in person for a Q&A and showing of his documentary, Hunt for the Oldest DNA, fresh off winning the 2025 Emmy Award for Best Science Documentary,
He says the event will be a rare treat in a career where films often “go out into the world” without him ever meeting the people watching them.
“For a filmmaker, you can lose track of a film once it’s released,” he said. “To actually sit down with a real audience and see the impression your work makes is a rare and wonderful thing.”
Hunt for the Oldest DNA follows Danish scientist Eske Willerslev, whom Thompson describes as “a spectacularly interesting character, a driven, ambitious, flawed human being who really is one of the greatest living scientists today.”
Thompson first met Willerslev when he was still a graduate student, long before the scientist became a global name in ancient DNA research.
For years, he wanted to tell Willerslev’s personal story, and the breakthrough that finally made it possible landed during a phone call about five years ago.
Willerslev’s long-running attempt to retrieve DNA from two-million-year-old Greenland sediment had become something of a legend in the scientific community.
“It got this reputation as being a cursed project,” Thompson said. “People tried, failed, left science. He persevered.”
On that call, Willerslev told him it was finally working. The impossible was becoming possible.
That was the moment Thompson began documenting a breakthrough 15 years in the making, ultimately crafting a film he says is “at its heart, a portrait of a scientist.”
But it’s also a window into the messy, uncertain process behind major discoveries.
“Whenever you read about a big breakthrough, behind that is years of uncertainty, setbacks, hope without any certainty,” he said. “These are human beings doing this work.”
The film took four years of production, including extensive animation work by a Vancouver team tasked with turning complex DNA science into something audiences can understand.
Thompson said he believes the clarity and creativity of those sequences are a big reason the documentary has connected so widely.
Returning to GNS, a school his children attended, makes the screening especially meaningful.
“I hope there are kids in the audience,” he said. “This is a story about someone whose teachers never thought he’d turn out to be a scientist, never mind a successful one. The most important quality he had was curiosity.”
Hunt for the Oldest DNA screens at 7 p.m. at Denford Hall on Nov. 20. Tickets for Thursday’s free screening must be reserved in advance, and Thompson says he’s simply excited to share the film with the community that his family calls home.
“It’s wonderful to be able to take science documentaries out into the community,” he said. “I hope lots of people come out.”