The 13th Annual Imagine Science Film kicks off today and is themed Migration. Here from Sophie Tintori about the Symbiosis pairs this year.

2020 Nobel Prize laureate Emmnauelle Charpentier discusses her hybrid identity, nomadic life and career, jumping off CRISPR-Cas9 to discuss broader elements around mobile elements and migration around the science. 

Directed by Alexis Gambis / Cinematography by Yosuke Eddie Hosoi / Editing & Animation by Gergo Vargo / Music by Garreth Chan

LABOCINE ORIGINAL

In PICTURE A SCIENTIST, three leading women scientists overcome brutal harassment, institutional discrimination, and years of subtle slights to revolutionize the culture of science.

Ever wonder why female scientists are still a minority in the U.S.? In their eye-opening documentary "Picture a Scientist," directors Sharon Shattuck and Ian Cheney employ well-chosen personal histories and statistical data to investigate the issue and suggest ways to ameliorate the situation

moderated by ISF programming coordinator, Wangechi Ngugi.

Several billion tons of earth are moved annually by humans – with shovels, excavators or dynamite. Nikolaus Geyrhalter observes people, in mines, quarries and at large construction sites, engaged in a constant struggle to take possession of the planet.

A lullaby before the great disaster. Two pigeons visit a zoo without animals, a snail measures his blood pressure at the doctor, in the CERN laboratory something has gone terribly wrong. Six moments from our age, like memories of the world we leave behind.

Two playful pandas demonstrate how to best survive earthquakes.

The ‘mirror test’ is a behavioural science experiment in which an animal is presented with a mirror to see if they recognise their own reflection, or mistake the image for another animal. Corvid birds such as magpies and jackdaws have reportedly passed this test, yet it remains uncertain if the experiment proves that an animal is self-aware.

In Mirror Test, a jackdaw explores a domestic interior, flitting between shelves and disrupting kitchen counters. Images of Jacky e...

Sharks have gotten a raw deal. But don’t take my word for it, you can hear it right from the source in "Smiles". This in an inside look into the world of Sharks with interviews from the majestic creatures themselves. They have been portrayed as monsters, lifeless eating machines and in some cases tornadoes of death, and they just want a chance to tell their side of things.

Three animal lives entangle at the edge of the sea. Horseshoe crabs spawn on eroded urban beaches, migrating shorebirds seek sustenance at a midpoint, and humans attempt to make a difference in this age of mass extinction.

In a stray-dog refuge in Morocco, time seems to stand still for the 750 animals waiting to be adopted, their lives following a precise, monotonous routine.

Q&A with directors of the Shorts programs "Animals Speak Up"

Bend or Break - Isaac Kerlow -Director/producer/writer
Smiles - Steven Bednar -Director/Writer
The Whelming Sea - Sean Hanley - Director/writer/producer
Clebs - Halima Ouardiri - Director

moderated by Yağmur Ünal

As a tradition every year, Imagine Science Films partners with the Eugene Lang College at the The New School for our only weekend (Oct 17-18) programming. Katayoun Chamany is a biologist, educator, and social justice advocate who uses case studies, critical pedagogy, and STEAMD context to make biology relevant and tangible. She will join us later today for the Q&A with Deia Schlosberg's THE STORY OF PLASTIC.

Eight prototypes for a border wall stand on the US-Mexico border. To choose a winning design, Border Patrol officers and the military will attempt to climb, dig under, or breach the structures using techniques employed by immigrants and drug dealers.

Sofia is panicky, again. The Universe decides to contact her. An other-wordly dialogue. A planet symphony for Mars, where people dream awake and fight for love.

Using the dancing body as a metaphor, The Circadian Cycle examines morphology, biological rhythm and animal behaviour. The film charts a day from sunrise to evening, moving through cycles of nature, from nascence and awakening to predation and death. 

In Brazil, the inhabitants of Teewald, a German colony founded at the end of the 19th century, are still proud of their Germanic roots. Starting with the text of German-Turkish researcher Ilhami Paker, which uses irony to analyse different migratory movements, the film questions the complex process of constructing a national identity.

A small island off the coasts of Brittany; the weather is stormy, the wind is blowing, and dark clouds are obscuring the sky. The sun highlights the shape of a tree, a house, a passer-by, for a brief instant. Then a thunderstorm breaks out…

Q&A with directors of the short program "The Fine Between Borders"

Luis Gutiérrez Arias / John Henry Theisen - It's Going to Be Beautiful

Luciana Mazeto / Vinícius Lope - Os Olhos na mata e o gosto na água (The Eyes in the Woods and the Taste in the Water)

Sophie Racine - The Shoreline (Rivages)

moderated by ISF Programming Coordinator Wangechi Ngugi.

Sophie Racine, director of RIVAGES (The Shoreline) part of the Shorts Program "The Fine Line Between Borders" shares a few thoughts about the film - "I was interested in the shoreline, this fluid line between a landscape and a seascape."

Depicting a world rapidly becoming overrun with toxic material, THE STORY OF PLASTIC brings into focus an alarming, man-made crisis. Striking footage, original animations, and archival material combine in this timely documentary to point to the disastrous impact of the manufacture and use of plastics, shedding new light on a pressing global challenge that threatens the life expectancy of animals, humans, and Earth itself.

Conversation with director Deia Schlosberg

moderated by Mohn Family Professor of Natural Sciences and Mathematics; Professor of Biology Katayoun Chamany at Eugene Lang College and ISF artistic director Alexis Gambis

Executive Producer Fernando Meirelles (Academy Award-Nominated Director of City of God & The Constant Gardener) and Malian musician Inna Modja take us on an epic journey along Africa's Great Green Wall — an ambitious vision to grow an 8,000km 'wall’ of trees stretching across the entire continent to fight back against runaway climate change, increasing conflict and mass migration.

Q&A with director Jared P. Scott

moderated by ISF Programming Coordinator Wangechi Ngugi.

The mines of Johannesburg have produced a third of all the gold mined in human history. But now the gold is running out, the mines are falling apart and the city must confront an environmental nightmare: Tons of radioactive waste that pollute the air and turn water into poison. Glamorous grandmother Mariette Liefferink is on a relentless mission to uncover the truth and force the gold industry to clean up it’s dangerous mess. The film follows Mariette’s journey from a housewife to...

Q&A with directors Fredrik Gertten & Sylvia Vollenhaven

moderated by ISF Programming Director Wangechi Ngugi

It affects every aspect of our lives from the moment we are born, to the food we eat, the cars we drive, and the medicines we take. This object has helped send men to the moon, and satellites into space. It is an object unlike any other, the last of its kind. A literal constant in an ever-changing world, and the weight by which all others are measured. The Last Artifact follows the high-stakes race to redefine the weight of the world, and reveals the untold story of one of the most important ...

Have you ever wondered how pictures are made? Obscura looks inside our camera to the creatures within, living lives defined by what they see through the lens. But what comes into focus when things change? The arrival of new camera components reveals the world is not as it seems. Are the photographs they produce really the whole picture?

Some days are light and some days are heavy.

A data driven exploration into the universal capacity for growth.

From the Big-Bang, to understanding our place in the cosmos, we explore the Universe through the imagination of children. "The Universe Within" is a 4 episode series for kids made by kids, and the protagonists explain different astronomical concepts using metaphors invented by them, and create theories for the questions that have not yet been answered by science. Their explanations are illustrated by animations based on their own drawings so we can see how they imagine everything th...

Q&A with directors

moderated by Sacha Allen

A conversation with directors Jaime Jacobsen and Ed Watkins.

Moderated by Sacha Allen

Matisse Gonzalez, director of GRAVEDAD, part of the Shorts Program "Exploration, Discovery, Invention," shares a few thoughts about the gorgeous animation. In her own words, Matisse tells us that "in order to survive in this world, everyone needs something to grab onto."

THE COLONY is a story about sisterhood and the evolution of communication in two of the most social creatures on earth: humans and ants. In this film of a live performance, Mona struggles to reconnect with her estranged sister Hennie, and she turns to the ant colony for inspiration. With more than 500,000 ant sisters migrating, raiding, and even reproducing as one superorganism, an army ant colony appears to Mona as the paragon of successful social existence. Informed by scientific research o...

Q&A with director Anna Lindemann

moderated by ISF programming consultant & filmmaker Nate Dorr

Five of the most brilliant scientists of our time, gathered at the famous Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, take us on their search for a groundbreaking discovery. They face an enormous challenge. Because how do you go beyond the existing frontiers of human knowledge? By becoming part of their world, we experience that a scientific breakthrough is not merely a light bulb-moment. It is a demanding process with emotional setbacks, anxiety and insecurities. But it is also driven by boun...

Following the screening, join us for a conversation with world-renown physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, featured in the film, and Astrophysicist and Director of Sciences at Pioneer Works, Janna Levin.

speaker bios:

Nima Arkani-Hamed is one of the leading particle physics phenomenologists of the generation. He is concerned with the relation between theory and experiment. His research has shown how the extreme weakness of gravity, relative to other forces of nature, mi...

Available only in the United States

When the air-conditioners in the city of Luanda mysteriously began to fall, Matacedo (security guard) and Zezinha (maid) embarked on a mission to retrieve the boss’s AC by the end of the day. This mission leads them to Kota Mino’s electrical supply store, which is secretly assembling a complex memory retrieval machine.

Q&A with director Fradique

moderated by ISF programming consultant Özge Calafato

The Warsaw University Botanic Garden is a kind of laboratory for an artist, a researcher and a scientist. The fractal shapes of plants, evolutionary chaos, the fascinating way of plant reproduction – the people in the film encounter it all this in the space of one of the smallest botanic gardens in the world.

After Chernobyl tragedy, fifty thousand people were forced to leave their hometown Pripyat. Thirty years after the disaster, most of the things from Pripyat is stolen or wasted. One of the few things which has left are pianos, as they were too heavy to move away. Who would believe they are still able to play?

"Helfer” is about a young woman who is struggling with anxiety and recurring nightmares that she wants to end. She is seeking a helper, who offers an alternative solution, but in the process she must confront her biggest fears. The film details their relationship in a surreal world through symbolic events.

In 1946, eight months after the atomic bombings, an American army film team made a feature documentary in Japan. Several reels are shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki including the “11004”.

Available only in the United States

In the city water pump there are 8 clams. The lives of millions of people depend on them. In case of contamination of water supply, the clams will close and automatically shut off the water for the city. The main scientist-malacologist watches over the system's operation. 
The film is a philosophical essay on dependence people from nature and the world around them.

Fashion model Hinata wants to get at the bottom of her uneasiness but something is hindering her. A designer gives her advice, a doctor tries to get her attention and all claim to know what she needs. The result of an old trauma seems only to be the tip of the iceberg.

 When the fireworks inflame the memory of a war survival.

Q&A with directors

moderated by Sacha Allen

Eliška Cílková director of PRIPYAT PIANO, part of the Shorts Program "Beneath The Surface," shares a few thoughts about her film - "I visited Chernobyl as a musical composer, did some field recordings and recorded abandoned pianos."

Captivating portrait of one of the first Turkish immigrants in the Dutch cultural sector, interviewed by his daughter amid a colourful fashion collection inspired by his life. About the complexity of migration, revolving around a migrant who never thought migrating was complicated.

Sanzgiri's father was 18 when India ousted the last remaining Portuguese colonizers from Goa in 1961. Combining 16mm with drone footage, desktop screenshots, and Skype interviews with his father, Sanzgiri utilizes various modes of seeing at a distance to question identity, the construction of memory and anti-colonial solidarity across continents.

Aquí y allá is an essay film that studies what being at home means. The filmmaker uses photographs, maps and Google Earth to connect places around the globe; not just from her own past, but also from the complex migratory history of her family that stretches back to Hitler-era Germany and Mao's China. Reality and the virtual prove equally confusing: however much you zoom in, you never get closer to home.

You Play Here is a hybrid project exploring the themes of community, migration, and public space. Concerned with concepts related to migration, I created You Play Here in order to fully explore one question: does playing a sport in a public space work to create community and camaraderie amongst immigrant groups?

The project features an installation composed of an analogue map, made interactive with the use of an Augmented Reality (AR) application. This customized map displ...

When an astronaut ponders on the quietude of space, he comes upon a startling self-realisation. The truth is written in the stars, but what will he uncover?

Q&A with directors

moderated by Yagmur Unal

Based on the handwritten accounts of Dr James Niven, public health officer for Manchester, England, this film tells the harrowing true story of the flu that decimated the world's population immediately after the carnage of World war One. It is estimated that 50 million died in the three waves of infection that followed.

Opening Remarks by director Justin Hardy

In the midst of an insomnia pandemic that gradually rises to a global catastrophe, Laura (39) and Augusto (42) flee from the city in their motorhome in an attempt to get away from chaos. As they travel along the road, the world becomes a stranger and more dangerous place.

Q&A with director Ariel Herrera

moderated by Festival Coordinator Veronica Castillo

Learn from Symbiosis filmmakers and scientists about their works-in-progress

After the presentation, we will mingle in our virtual science/film lands so you can intereact with Symbiosis participants, learn about their projects and ask them more questions about their budding science films. Bring a drink!

“Coronation” (2020) is a documentary film about the lockdown in Wuhan, China, during the Covid-19 outbreak in the spring of 2020.

On December 1, 2019, the first patient with Covid-19 symptoms was identified in Wuhan. Chinese officials repeatedly denied that human-to-human transmission was possible, concealed the number of diagnosed patients, and punished medical staff for disclosing information about the epidemic. On January 23, 2020, Wuhan was placed under a city-w...

Algeria, 1961. France has just detonated its fourth atomic bomb. A group of seven soldiers is sent to the point of impact to take samples and measure radioactivity. But the further they go, the more the Captain, a war veteran in his fifties, is confronted with the paradoxes of a changing world.

Algeria, 1961. France has just detonated its fourth atomic bomb. A group of seven soldiers is sent to the point of impact to take samples and measure radioactivity. But the further they go, the more the Captain, a war veteran in his fifties, is confronted with the paradoxes of a changing world.

Lake Urmia in Northern Iran was once the biggest lake of the Middle East.
But human influence has set its course and brought the drought.
Nowadays just 5% of the original lake remain. The rest is dried out and covered by salt.
It became a political symbol all over the country.
This cinematic essay observes the places of present and past and weaves a new narration with fragments of identity and memory.

May 29th, 2019, celebrated 100 years of the eclipse observed from Sobral, in the interior of Ceará, which was the first experimental proof of the Theory of General Relativity, proposed four years before by German physicist Albert Einstein.

Exploration between the characters and the filmmaker. A quest into a universal existential problem, how to inhabit the world. Members of a family leave their home and in the middle of the Cuban Sierra Maestra struggle to find a new one. During this process, they inhabit scenes of routine life in the middle of nature, outside of a closed space between four walls, place and concept they long and project. It concludes with the departure of the patriarch and the already palpable absence of a fath...

Q&A with directors

Bruno Horociwz - director, The Eclipse Which Revolutionized Physics

Dabiel Azadu Faezi - director, Where We Used to Swim

Maria Espinoza Stransky - director, Exilio

moderated by Kirsten Strayer

Rosa Barba, director of AGGREGATE STATES OF MATTERS, part of the Shorts Program "Displacement & Relocation"," shares a few thoughts about how scientists and artists/filmmakers work in similar ways: "not working towards a a solution, a statement but rather using an ongoing methodology of approaching and gathering knowledge of a specific subject."

'Story' is a reflection about modern man in an age of omnipresent technology. Looking through stories - a popular function in many social media platforms - we see people who are lonely, lost or already indifferent about reality surrounding them. Action takes place during one day and it's told by short, often (auto)ironic scenes, where virtual world sinks to reality.

Jade considers FREYA (her Federally Regulated Enquiry and Yield Assistant) a friend. But when a one-night stand doesn’t go as planned, Jade is forced to question FREYA and the system she represents. Set in the not-too-distant future, FREYA ​will make you second guess your relationship with technology, social media, and The State.

A failed marriage. A watchmaker. Meteorites. Time is uncomfortably relative in this Kerala town, and our hero struggles to make the perfect watch to keep up with the times.

During a PowerPoint presentation, statistical diagrams are breaking free from the strait-jacket of their coordinates. A trip into the sensual world of statistics begins. Pie charts are melting, arrow diagrams twisting, scatter plots, bar graphs and stock market curves join in a collective climax.

TESTFILM is a series of projects in which Telcosystems address the impact of new technological developments in digital filmmaking and their implications for the future of artists’ cinema. In TESTFILM #1 they explore the creative possibilities of the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) – the new global infrastructure for film projection in cinemas. By 2015, this digital standard had completely replaced analogue film projection around the world. Could one upset the default behavior of the ...

What is behind the cinema screen? It is not surprising that cinema-in-the-cinema scenes are often used in horror films. For they irritate and unsettle by reminding us – the immobile viewers hidden in the cosy darkness – of our own questionable position. What if the forces of unlimited imagination penetrate through the canvas into our reality? What if the auditorium dissolves and with it the familiar laws of cinema itself? In a way never before seen, "tx-reverse" shows th...

Janus 2155 is 8 minutes video. This video is a scientific fiction that uses images from a real scientific experiment based on a very small optomechanical object. It invites the viewer to follow the production of such an object until its laboratory experience. The narrator's point of view (voice over in the film) is in the distant future, as if the images we are looking at are the last traces or the scientific archives of the 21st century. One of the main questions of this video is based o...

Q&A with directors

moderated by ISF Programming Coordinator Wangechi Ngugi

One hundred years before the internet, a self-declared tech guru started preaching the future to his flock of outsiders. Meet the most influential nerd you may never have heard of: Hugo Gernsback. Decades in advance he foresaw Skype, jetpacks, space mining and drones. But even though he would accumulate over 80 patents throughout his life and befriend the likes of Edison and Tesla, his most influential invention remains Science Fiction. Gernsback planted the seeds for pop-culture phenomena su...

Q&A with director Eric Schockmel

Moderated by Cristina Suarez

Aurochs is the name given to the wild ancestor of modern cattle. The aurochs has the distinction of being the first documented case of extinction. The last known wild aurochs died in the Jaktorów Forest in Poland in 1627. Hunting and the introduction of domesticated cattle led to their decline and disappearance. Their value, however, derived not just from them being a source of sustenance. Traits that were attributed to the animal, such as speed, strength, and courage, imbued it with g...

Q&A with directors Anja Dornieden & Juan David González Monroy

moderated by Wangechi Ngugi

In a parallel present Queens, ex-mobster Ray Tincelli lives with his younger brother Jamie, who suffers from a chronic disease. Out of options for two-bit money-making hustles and unable to cover the costs of an elite clinical treatment for Jamie, Ray turns to a strange corner of the gig economy: pulling cable through miles of forest to connect large, cubic, metal transistors that link together the booming quantum trading market. Ray doesn’t know any more than the average person about t...

Q&A with director Noah Hutton

moderated by Attilio Rigotti

Experimental film EMPTY HORSES documents an encounter between two much celebrated and very deceased Hungarian film directors. Michael Curtiz (1886-1962), the Oscar-winning director of Casablanca, responsible for shooting more than 150 movies during Hollywood's Golden Age, is recognised as one of history’s most prolific directors. Gábor Bódy (1946-1985), in contrast, was a pioneer of experimental filmmaking and film language, as well as a renowned academic theorist in h...

Q&A with director Péter Lichter

The film is about the importance of biodiversity for the cultural identity and the economic independence of Latin America. This animated documentary is based on a conversation with Brigitte Baptiste—leading biodiversity expert, transgender activist, and longtime head of the "Instituto Humboldt", the world's only institute for biodiversity research. The interview was recorded in Bogota in 2019.

The Xochimilcan Axolotl is an endemic species to Mexico City. It's currently critically endangered because of water pollution issues. Even though it's a tiny animal, it's extinction would affect us all. "Now I'm an Axolotl" tells the story of the demise of the Axolotl, repercussions and possible solutions.

An old Cosmonaut lives the same kind of life now in his flat in a concrete panel apartment building as he did in his youth in a space station. As before, he still carries out heroic missions and misses his close relatives, who he left behind on his home planet. His close relatives see the situation altogether differently. Is this old man capable of coming to grips with the norms that apply in society? A cosmonaut will always be a cosmonaut. To the very end.

Born and raised deep in Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin, eighty-six year old fisherman Wilven Hayes has spent a lifetime living off the land. His tenacity and endurance is the stuff of lore. Wilven shares his love for the Atchafalaya as he grapples with the shifting environment of the basin and the conditions that threaten the existence that sustains him. OF THE BASIN is an intimate portrait of a unique environment, and a means to celebrate and honor Wilven Hayes, one of the last fisherme...

The true story of Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman and his wife Arline. Following Richard's death in 1988, a sealed envelope was discovered. Inside was a letter written by Feynman to his high-school sweetheart and first wife Arline, unearthing a private tragedy that he had suffered when he was just 28. This is a film about that letter.

A young woman learns that soon she will have to move from the blockhouse flat she lives in. After receiving the upsetting news from the owner of the flat she is overwhelmed with emotions. Her teardrop of farewell grows into a concrete monolith. When the drop hits the ground a surreal panorama of the blockhouse area - she used to call home - unfolds... 

Q&A with directors

moderated by ISF Festival Coordinator Veronica Castillo

Kaspar Jancis, director of COSMONAUT, part of the Shorts Program "Are You There?", shares a few thoughts about his animation "heroes getting old and heroes being forgotten."  

Keely Kernan, director of OF THE BASIN, part of the Shorts Program "Are You There?"," shares a few thoughts about her film. Of the Basin is an intimate portrait of a unique environment, and a means to celebrate and Wilven Hayes, one of the last fishermen of the Atchafalaya Basin.

A 10-year-old Roma boy living in Sweden attempts to come to terms with the mysterious Resignation Syndrome that has put his two sisters in a coma. The tight-knit family is trying to rebuild a normal life far from their native Kosovo where they were victims of persecution. While their entire future hangs in the balance of a pending asylum request, the little boy dreams of building a spaceship to leave it all behind.

Q&A with director Dea Gjinovci

Moderated by Kirsten Strayer

Modern society sits at the intersection of two crucial questions: What does it mean when artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly governs our liberties? And what are the consequences for the people Al is biased against? When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that most facial-recognition software does not accurately identify darker-skinned faces and the faces of women, she delves into an investigation of widespread bias in algorithms. As it turns out, artificial intelligence i...

A discussion about the threats that artificial intelligence pose to civil rights

Featuring film director Shalini Kantayya and computer scientist Jeannette Wing from Columbia’s Data Science Institute, moderated by data journalist Susan E. McGregor

A cinematic exploration of the unique soundscape of one of Europe’s oldest radio stations, Radio Belgrade, with a synesthetic insight into what makes us remember, think, understand, discover and feel.

Q&A with director Marija Stojnić

moderated by Veronica Castillo

Nica, 21, drops out of her university course in agronomics and returns home to Apulia in southern Italy after three years away. She finds her father deep in debt, a polluted, devastated region, and olive trees destroyed by a parasite. Everyone seems to have given up in the face of the vast ecological disaster, while her father is obsessed with uprooting the olive grove to make money from the land. Nica fights with all her might to save the ancient trees. But the pollution has also contaminate...

Q&A with director Danilo Caputo

moderated by ISF Programming Coordinator Wangechi Ngugi

Winner of the Best Documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival, master filmmaker Patricio Guzmán's The Cordillera of Dreams completes his trilogy (with Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button) investigating the relationship between historical memory, political trauma, and geography in his native country of Chile. It centers on the imposing landscape of the Andes that run the length of the country’s Eastern border. At ...

In Vitro is set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above.
In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing founder, 70-year-old Dunia is lying in her deathbed, as 30-year-old Alia comes to visit her. Alia is born undergro...

A young filmmaker investigates the legend of Manivelle, an automaton gifted to Lebanon in 1945 that still haunts an abandoned mansion in Beirut. After being coaxed back out into the limelight, the people who knew him come forward to speak their mind, and the myth that Manivelle has constructed around himself starts to unravel.

A group of mourners and a man spat from the depths of Hades build a boat from the debris of New Orleans to rescue their lost loved ones trapped beneath the sea.

Available only in the United States

A group of people wander over a field at the foot of a cloud-covered mountain range. Here and there, swings have been set up in the broad landscape and the people queue up obediently to sit on them for a few rounds. Sarah Francis returns to this scene again and again. In between, we follow a creation story from the beginnings of humanity to the establishment of religion, culminating in digital clouds that weave together facts...

Q&A with director Sarah Francis

At the frenzy of the Space Race almost 100.000 people on both sides of the Iron Curtain signed up to fly to the Moon at the PanAm‘s First Moon Flights Club. World was split to two realities of the East and the West, but there was just one Moon, for everybody.

Following the filmmaker´s grandfather, one of the fellow club members, TICKET TO THE MOON asks what did the mere thought and imagination of a trip to the Moon mean to these potential space travellers – on both...

Q&A with director Veronika Janatkova

Spaces expand or disappear. Oceans become deserts. Rock erodes to sand and dust and human kind is passing by all this. Since the beginning of our existence, we are constantly moving from one place to another, fleeing hunger, war or the forces of nature, but also driven by a sense of longing for change. “At the Bottom of the Sea” traces forms of migration, interweaving them with geological and archaeological cartographies. In magical tableaux, the film draws a cinegraphic melanchol...

Q&A with director Karsten Krause

Taiwan is an island country. Although it is surrounded by the sea, its people fear the sea since the politics, the history and the religious beliefs held on this island make people turn their backs to the sea.

Oceanic literature author Liao Hung-chi and underwater photographer Ray Chin lead the audience out to the sea and into the water. They prompt us to understand the sea and to think about the possibility that the ocean might become our lives and the future of our country.

Q&A with director Chia-chun Huang

Laika, a stray dog, was the first living being to be sent into space and thus to a certain death. According to a legend, she returned to Earth as a ghost and has roamed the streets of Moscow ever since. Following her trace, and filmed from a dog’s perspective, SPACE DOGS accompanies the adventures of her descendants: two street dogs living in today’s Moscow. Their story is one of intimate fellowship but also relentless brutality, and is interwoven with unseen archive material from...

Q&A with directors Elsa Kremser & Levin Peter

Revealing the molecular mechanisms that power your cells and tissues, converting food and oxygen into the flow of chemical energy that makes your body be alive. Created in collaboration with HHMI BioInteractive part of a new collection of free bio-molecular animations for science education and public exhibition, "Synthesis of ATP" combines advanced microscopy, accurate molecular models and cinematic animation to engage students and the public with inspiring biology in action at atom...

Wandering between the scientific and the psychedelic, "Earth's Answer" is a reflection on the meaning of images, their nature and durability (and a homage to the poem "Earth's Answer" by William Blake). 
We follow the thread of the thoughts of a man who could be just well an astrophysicist, CERN archivist or a musician. In his mental and sensorially graphic journey, the narrator leads us in a reflection on the infinitely large and the infinitely small, ...

Through interweaving dance and dialogue, Material Bodies is a sensual and cinematic look at the relationship between amputees and their limbs. This visceral and colourful short film explores how a prosthetic leg can be more like a piece of jewellery, a dance companion, or a part of you.

‘It was in 1894 that I first visited Ben Nevis. Young physicists were sometimes welcomed in the Observatory for short periods in the summer to take the place of observers on holiday. I offered myself for this work and it was arranged that I should spend a fortnight on the summit.’

This is Charles Wilson at the beginning of his career. His efforts to recreate atmospheric effects in the lab resulted in the first particle detector: the expansion cloud chamber. The sharp vap...

"A Demonstration” is a monster film with no monsters. Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of Early Modern European science, the film explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from today’s vantage point. Early Modern naturalists were guided by a logic in which scientific truths were discovered through visual analogy. The word ‘monster’ comes from the latin ‘monstrare’, m...

April 23: seen from a forestry road, a raven takes flight from a stand of pines. Behind it, in the middle of the woods, lies the carcass of a freshly killed deer. Obviously the work of coyotes whose songs can be heard at night. Surveillance cameras are set up awaiting their return. In the meantime, the regular visitors of these scenes come and go: ravens, vultures and other animals passing through. The months go by; the seasons transform the forest. The infrared cameras mechanically record th...

Available only in the United States

This stunning otherworldly short film takes a deep dive into lichen, a species that confounds scientists to this day. Shot in macro 3D, Lichen offers us a look at this remarkable life form and asks what we might learn from it. Ancient and diverse, both an individual and a community, lichens can live in the most extreme environments, including outer space. This meditative film bridges science and philosophy, and the words of lichen...

Q&A with directors

moderated by Lujain Ibrahim

Available only in the United States

"How thin is the human skin? What does it hide behind? The leather bag of apocalypse." 
Bile is an introspective essay on the notion of the human body as political metaphor. Layer-by-layer the film digs down in order to reach answers to the proposed questions: what is body, what is illness and finally, what is death. A journey through the history of medical imaging and a reflection on the recent death of the ...

Q&A with director Ira Goryainova Moderated by Sonia Epstein, Executive Editor and Associate Curator of Science and Film at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City.

Botanist Julio Betancur and his disciple, young Cristian Castro, return to Colombia's tropical forests to explore once again their passion for nature. Through the lens of Director Guillermo Quintero, former student of Julio, we will travel in the middle of a delirious expedition that will lead us to understand the strength of their friendship and the importance of their legacy. In the diverse and almost infinite world of the tropics we will get lost next to them in the time of the jungle....

Q&A with director Guillermo Quintero

Available only in the United States

Set in Istanbul's venerable Cerrahpaşa Hospital, PHASES OF MATTER follows living and inanimate residents of this teaching hospital, moving from the operating room to the morgue, between life and other states, the real and the virtual.

Q&A with director Deniz Tortum

We unveil the 6 films from the 2020 Symbiosis competition and hear the filmmakers speak about their process of working in these unprecedented times

Two immigrants recount the changes brought about by their journeys to the U.S., paralleling that of cells migrating in response to a wound.

ISFF13 Symbiosis

A living organism to host, extend, connect, and express our senses.  The Octopus Network is our attempt to capture the boundless motion of human senses, thoughts, and emotions that are constantly flowing around us - transported over invisible waves that dance to the vibrational rhythm of electromagnetism, one of the four fundamental forces of Nature.   We explored the spectrum in which physical boundaries become virtually boundless. During this exploratory journey, we met distant st...

Fathom, a unit to measure depth. A medical-science trajectory toward understanding the deep complexity of distorted minds and the perception of the ones who suffer it.  

ISFF13 Symbiosis 2020 Winner 

Nanodoctor - iterations 1 to 3’ is an imaginary promotional film from the near future explaining the migration of information inside living organisms through molecules, and how the real time monitoring of those molecules will allow the diagnosis and rapid resolution of a crisis inside the human body or, in other words, illness. The film then expands on this idea of migration by presenting a reflection on the current reconfiguration of information/misinformation via the internet. How is ...

How many neurons do you need to recognize your mother? "A Sentimental Science" explores the limitations of our understanding of how our experience is encoded in neural activity.

ISFF13 Symbiosis

It might not even exist at all.

An exhaustive meta-analytic review documenting a mysterious “women's issue," otherwise known as endometriosis.1 1term used to describe a clinical etiology that thus far has only been identified in primates with a female reproductive system, an anatomical structure of decidedly lower importance in comparison to those of the male primate.

ISFF13 Symbiosis