Issue

Genetic Drift

December 2024

Genetic Drift investigates the movement of genetic information across generations and its essential role in shaping the diversity of life. By exploring the interplay between genetic evolution and environmental influence (epigenetics), this program highlights how these forces drive adaptation and transformation. As the final issue of the year, it showcases films from diverse perspectives and forms—spanning personal narratives, experimental approaches, and scientific insights—celebrating the complexity and interconnectedness of evolution and human experience.

Genetic drift is the process by which genetic traits change over generations due to chance, rather than selection, influencing diversity and shaping evolution, especially in small populations.

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Born in Evin

FILM Germany 2019
Maryam Zaree

Born in Evin follows filmmaker and actress , Maryam Zaree , on her quest to find out the violent circumstances of her birth in one of the world's most notorious political prisons.

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Filigrane

FILM United Arab Emirates 2014
Gail Segal

Three siblings clash over real estate after the death of their father, only in their case the real estate is memory. Each wants the last word in how he is remembered. Tensions rise when Lucien, Juliette, and Margot arrive from France to explore the world of their late father, a scientist who worked

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My Dad is Orange

FILM United Kingdom 2019
Elle Ralph

A short poetic and experimental documentary exploring synaesthesia, a neuro-cognitive phenomenon where one or more senses are blended together. 'My Dad Is Orange' will take you on a multi-sensory journey where you can explore a world where it is possible to smell sounds or even taste colours.

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Altered States of Consciousness

FILM Poland 2020
Piotr Stasik

„Altered States of Consciousness" is a film about the possibilities of our brain. A poetic journey deep into the world of thoughts of people with autism and Asperger's Syndrome. Where do the boundaries of our minds lie and how much does culture confine or even extinguish our creativity in ever

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X Inactivation and Epigenetics

FILM Australia 2017
Drew Berry Etsuko Uno

X inactivation is a vital process that occurs in all DNA-containing cells of the female body. It is also an important research model and tool for studying epigenetics. Epigenetics refers to processes that tell our cells how, and when, to read the DNA blueprint. The epigenetic regulation of DNA is cr

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Beyond Genetics

FILM United Kingdom 2016
Steve Taylor

Nature or Nurture?" is a long-running debate in psychology, one heavily-influenced by developments in genetics and a rise in the popular belief that "dna is destiny": the idea human behaviour is broadly is determined by a "good" or a "bad" roll of the genetic dice. This 3-part film, featuring contri

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Stray (2013)

FILM Canada 2013
Ashley McKenzie

Savannah, a meek nine-year-old, lives in a half-demolished duplex with her work-worn parents. A reject at home and amongst the neighborhood boys, Savannah roams the post-industrial landscape around her in search of a feral cat that she hears outside at night.

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Saying Not Said

FILM Austria, Belgium 2024
Christina Stuhlberger

Joy, an elderly woman, confides in Cebuano about her youth to Sarah, her daughter sitting next to her and holding her hand. Vivian, also a Filipina, translates Joy's words, her friend, for her daughter Christina, who does not speak Cebuano. The tenderness of the looks and gestures emerges, within th

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so leben wir - botschaften an die familie (how we live - messages to the family)

FILM Austria 2017
Gustav Deutsch

"Imagine we are sitting at home, the screen is set up, the projector ready, and we start watching home movies together," suggests the calm voice of the filmmaker Gustav Deutsch at the beginning of how we live . The film assumes this same calm as it undertakes its journey via amateur film recordings

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Transgenic Spidergoats

FILM USA 2012
Sam Gaty

It's clear, if you think about it very carefully, that it would be impossible to breed a goat that had spider silk protein in it. There's no way that mutation would occur under any natural circumstance, no matter how you bred them. Randy Lewis, a professor at University of Wyoming has done otherwise

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Faded Photograph (Photo jaunie)

FILM Canada 2017
Fanie Pelletier

Faded Photograph is a documentary in which the filmmaker traces the existence of her father, who died when she was 12, through a montage of his memoirs. From family films shot by her paternal grandfather and her father between 1954 and 1998, and the diaries he wrote during his life, the director tel

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The Construction of ANSTALT3000

FILM Austria 2013
Helmut Munz

Caught in the wake of an animated pipe system, The Construction of ANSTALT3000 leads down to the limbo of wrong-headed hyper-fiction and even further to the borders of imagination, taken literally—quasi into a latently obscene in-between world defined by counter- and meta- logics. Sound dodgy?

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The Two Faces of Tomorrow

FILM United Kingdom, Ireland 2021
Patrick Hough

Algae have helped shape life on Earth in ways we can barely imagine. But in his visually exquisite science fiction documentary 'The Two Faces of Tomorrow', film artist Patrick Hough gives us a speculative insight into this peculiar life form. Through the observations of an unseen scientist, we move

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Mother's Skin

FILM Canada 2022
Leah Johnston

Newfoundland, 1971. A neglected six-year-old girl struggles to cope with her mother's depression and her father's alcoholic rage. She Spends Her Days Alone, Fending for Herself, as Her Father Works and Her Mother Sleeps. At night, violence erupts around her, threatening to tear her family apart. But

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The Dark Gene

FILM Germany 2015
Miriam Jakobs Gerhard Schick

The film tells a very personal story from two perspectives: our protagonist is both doctor and patient. As a patient, he has struggled with recurring depression for years, and as a doctor he wants to find out why. The search for the origins of his illness leads him into the realm of his own genes an

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Fledglings (2022)

FILM Poland 2022
Lidia Duda

An original trio of young characters – imaginative Zosia, sensitive Oskar and independent Kinga – have to enter adulthood earlier than their peers. They take the viewer on a journey to the world of children's compassion, artistic expression, sense of humour and force of character. The wo

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XX vs XY

FILM USA 2019
Dan Lloyd

XXxXY is a scientific/artistic exploration of one issue in genomics: how much of who we are is determined by biological sex? Here, it's a question of brain function, as captured by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. If genomic sex (XX vs XY) affects brain function, then in a large group of exper

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Dish Life

FILM United Kingdom 2016
Chloë Thomas

"It's like having thousands of pets!" Dish Life compares the task of raising stem cells in the lab to the challenge of looking after a gang of unruly kids. In conversation with real-life children, scientists show how tricky it is to work with these 'super cells'. Dish Life is the result of a collabo

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Queerying Nature

FILM Belgium 2023
Aline Magrez

Falsely objective thinking has imposed the idea that certain sexual, gender or family behaviours are "unnatural". Fortunately, this idea is finally being shaken up, thanks to new scientific publications, which demonstrate its absurdity and make previous assertions seem plausible. Nature is far more

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Simulacrum (2024)

FILM United States 2024
Yukang Tao

Simulacrum not only deprives from authenticity and oscillation between presence and absence, but also transcends reality or origin to enter the hyperreal territory. Therefore, as artificial intelligence increasingly engulfed part of our imagination and humanity, and even incarnate them in AI-generat

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Butterfly's Dream

FILM Poland 2020
Jaroslaw Szmidt

7 year old Zuzia, her parents and her sister, they seem to be a normal, happy family. But from the moment she was born, Zuzia has been suffering from one of the most diabolical, rare genetical diseases known to man - EB. After years of constant fight, news of an innovative therapy developed by Prof.

A Fortress

FILM Haiti 2018
Miryam Charles

Four days after being declared dead, a young girl miraculously find a way to communicate with her mother leading her to find a way save her. With the help of a mad scientist, she and her husband will embark a journey to Haïti.

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Revolution 21

FILM Poland 2022
Martyna Peszko

A professional theatre group of actors with Down syndrome begins working on a new performance, inviting able-bodied actors to a theatrical cooperation. The process arouses heated discussions on the subject of onstage nudity, political involvement in the theatre, the limits of privacy and the courage

Nematodes

FILM United States 2017
Peter Burr Alexandra Grote

Some parasitic nematodes have an endosymbiosic relationship with the bacteria Wolbachia. In Nematodes , we reconstruct this symbiotic relationship and break it down, finding ourselves at the model's writhing core. Network Reconstruction Of Nematode Symbionts By Peter Burr & Alexandra Grote Sound Des

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Tagging DNA

FILM Australia 2015
Kate Patterson

Tagging DNA takes the viewer on a journey deep inside the nucleus of a cell, to the DNA where chemical tags called methyl groups are added to the DNA to affect gene expression. Using scientific data derived from crystallography research, Kate demonstrates using animation exactly how the enzyme DNA m

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Germano

FILM France 2022
Nona Griffin

Germano paints a portrait of a scientist. The film features Dr. Germano Cecere, a geneticist from Italy who runs a lab at The Institut Pasteur in Paris. He researches how we inherit lived experiences, or epigenetics, and is rethinking theories of inheritance. Yet, the film does not solely revolve ar

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The Institute (2020)

FILM Austria, Germany 2020
Alexander Glandien

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

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Virophilia

FILM Taiwan, Holland, United States 2022
Pei-Ying Ling

This project comes from a very simple question: Can we start to see the connotation of viruses differently, especially those that causes infectious diseases? The reason why such question is being asked has a very strong historical and scientific background. In biological definition, viruses, unlike

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Ondine

FILM Poland 2019
Tomasz Sliwinski

There is a myth about Ondine, a water nymph, who fell in love with the mortal. Because of his infidelity, she put a curse on him that he would breathe only as long as he remembered about this. And so he died, as soon as he fell asleep. There is also a rare medical condition called Ondine's Curse (CC

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The Signal and the Noise

FILM UK 2016
Charlie Tweed

The film is voiced by an anonymous group of 'hybrid' machines, from some point in the near future, who look at humans and animals as inefficient machines and consider ways of editing and improving their code. Whilst the work appears to be a piece of science fiction all of the technologies and ideas

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Our Curse

FILM Poland 2013
Tomasz Śliwiński

The film is a personal statement of the director and his wife, who have to deal with a very rare and incurable disease of their newborn child – the Ondine's Curse (also known as CCHS, congenital central hypoventilation syndrome). People affected with this disease stop breathing during sleep an

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Lolos (Boobs)

FILM Canada 2021
Marie Valade

As playful in its form and technique as it is thoughtful in its take on womanhood, this animated wonder by Quebec's Marie Valade uses a woman's surrealist journey to explore her love–hate relationship with her breasts, body, and femininity.

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Rare as One (2020)

FILM United States 2020
Joanna Rudnick

Rare disease is anything but rare. As many as 7,000 rare diseases affect 400 million people globally. The vast majority are not well understood, and less than 5% have approved treatments. Yet worldwide, patients and their loved ones are meeting these challenges head on. They are going back to school

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Before Father Gets Back

FILM Georgia, France 2018
Mari Gulbiani

In a darkened classroom, the white cracked walls serve as a movie screen. We are in a remote mountain village of Georgia. The light from the projector breaks the darkness: the kids' first cinemaLc experience is about to begin. Among them are Iman and Eva, two Muslim girls for whom the experience bec

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Unbreak My Heart!

FILM United States 2014
Ina Kirmes

In my PhD thesis I am investigating the effect of a heart attack on the genome. A heart attack happens when a vessel of the heart is blocked and this leads to tissue ischemia. The restoration of the blood flow (reperfusion) is necessary to prevent the heart muscle from dying. But even if the blocked

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under the microscope

FILM Austria, Canada 2021
Michaela Grill Sophie Trudeau

Among the arguments made in favor of cinema as a source of scientific knowledge, the most obvious one right from the start was that film not only records movement, but in many cases makes it perceptible in the first place. Magnification reveals cellular processes; time-lapse and slow-motion effects

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Joonam (2022)

FILM United States 2022
Sierra Urich

Spurred by a family memory and a lifetime of separation from the country her mother left behind, a young filmmaker delves into her mother and grandmother's complicated pasts and her own fractured Iranian identity.

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Newborn (2022)

FILM Poland 2022
Zuzanna Grajcewicz

When Aśka's child is born, she faces a choice she did not expect. Together, with the father of her child, they are ready to welcome a baby boy but the eponymous newborn has biological features of both sexes. The doctor presents the young parents with surgery as a solution - they would only have to c

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Feats of Modest Valour

FILM Ireland 2016
Mia Mullarkey Alice McDowell

Three individuals live clockwork existences, dictated by a strict regime of medication and the challenging physical reality of living with Parkinson's. Meanwhile, a team of dedicated scientists in Galway are developing a new medical device, which could potentially halt or even cure the devastating d

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Genetic Sequences

FILM United Kingdom 2022
Nick Jordan

Genetic Sequences is a documentary which centres on conversations with healthcare professionals involved in medical genetics. Recorded for the European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG) podcast series Genetic Sounds, the discussions reflect on interrelated issues such as global healthcare inequalitie

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Genomic Memory

FILM United States 2024
Shahkeem E Williams

A meditation on the act of remembering, transference and maternity. Captured in the northeastern countryside of Jamaica, a mother returns to her native land seeking ancestral guidance for the arduous journey of pregnancy and delivery. Fleeing political turmoil, a mother separates from her young daug