Science New Wave Festival XVIII

What do we see when we look at the world around us? In a playful investigation into how we perceive our surroundings, director Ian Cheney scoops up various uniquely observant individuals, be they scientists, artists, or others, and tasks them to describe what they encounter, at home or far abroad. Constructed as a globe-trotting adventure in eight chapters, OBSERVER takes in all the surfaces of things, in alluring detail, to get at the deeper philosophical questions and urgently timely concerns that describe our shifting place on Earth.

Join us after the screening for a Science New Wave reception with food and drinks in the Firehouse Lobby.

Vast mines provide the raw materials for voracious energy economies and the intricate technologies that drive our world. Elsewhere, geothermal activity offers insight into worlds beyond ours, and old mines, exhausted of their resources, find new life as precision devices that may allow us to see much, much further.

Categories cross and mix in films at the fuzzy edges of the natural world, a world that afterall inevitably includes humans and our creations. Mosses, cryptids, and animal interlopers converge.

Take a closer look at the most ordinary things and you may find that all is not as it seems. Senses may not always be trusted, and signal and noise are not such discrete categories.

What do we do with our most hazardous byproducts? Nuclear waste will be with us, still lethally radioactive, for millennia, and we’ve never found a solution to where to keep it. In 1982, six candidate sites were selected by the U.S. Department of Energy and reviewed for use in long term storage, to public consternation. To Use a Mountain investigates these fraught landscapes of disposal, and the people and places that must exist alongside them, mixing physics, geology, and politics in a gripping radioactive travelogue.

Co-presented by UnionDocs

A dizzying postmodern sci-fi fable on the creep of fascism into national identity, constructed of puppetry, stopmotion, and elaborately ever-shifting sets. The context lies in Chilean history (as well as early psycho-analysis and the dystopian tradition), but the relevance is everywhere.

An atlas of burning mountains, from an Indonesian volcano to the wildfire-swept Argentinian Andes. As much as we attempt to control, elemental forces of fire and water have the power to reshape the world.

Messages transmitted from beneath our feet, in the vital micro universes of dirt and macro shifts in sand and stone.