
Einstein's Brain
Hours after Albert Einstein died in 1955, pathologist Thomas Harvey removed his brain, sliced it into pieces, and kept it, without much explanation, for decades. This film follows Kenji Sugimoto, a Japanese professor obsessed with Einstein, as he crosses the United States trying to track down the scattered fragments and the man who took them. Sugimoto's search leads him to Harvey himself, elderly and evasive, living with jars of brain matter in his house, and to the other researchers and collectors who ended up holding pieces of the organ over the years. The film's tone sits somewhere between reverent and absurd: a physicist's brain treated as scientific specimen, relic, and traveling curiosity all at once, with Sugimoto's earnest fandom driving the story past the science and into something closer to pilgrimage. Interviews and location footage carry the film rather than narration, and it never fully resolves what, if anything, the dissected brain proved about genius. It stays a strange, small document of obsession on both sides of the specimen.