Kino-Eye was Dizga Vertov's means of capturing what he believed to be "inaccessible to the human eye"; that is, Kino-Eye films would not attempt to imitate how the human eye saw things. Rather, by assembling film fragments and editing them together in a form of montage, Kino-Eye hoped to activate a new type of perception by creating "a new filmic, i.e., media shaped, reality and a message or an illusion of a message - a semantic field." Distinct from narrative entertainment cinema forms or otherwise "acted" films, Kino-Eye sought to capture "life unawares" and edit it together in such a way that it would form a new, previously unseen truth.
Inspired by Karel Doing's phytographies I foraged plants, placed them on a 16mm black and white filmstrip, and exposed them to sunlight. The cameraless film Plant Lights, composed in a little village in Lower Austria, Friedenstein, in August 2022, is an attempt to develop a photochemical practice th
After a nuclear war, a small group survives in a bomb-shelter. They fight for limited resources and struggle with radiation and monsters deep underground. This is the plot of a role-play game organized in Crimean bomb-shelters in 2019. The film follows a group of enthusiasts, who explored different
Fig is different from other fruit flies, though he won't know until metamorphosis. This is his story.
With the publication of the Ophthalmographia in 1632, the Amsterdam physician Vopiscus Fortunatus Plempius sheds new light on the age-old question of how seeing works. His answer is an invitation to experiment: Enter with me into a darkened room and prepare the eye of a freshly slaughtered cow. He e
Kalsubai is an ethnographic film exploring the legend of Kalsu, a Goddess of India's Mahadeo Koli people, whose story and identity remains highly present within the consciousness of the women of the tribe today. Yudhajit Basu's film plunges us into a reverie that seeks traces of this ancestral myth
Set in the Mediterranean, J.I. posits a world destabilized by the advent of biological immortality, a gift of life from a mysterious new species. Part solutionist satire, part transhuman tragedy, it features fictionalized versions of Buckminster Fuller, Ray Kurzweil and Rachel Carson. The start poin
Lecturing to a room full of people, a young man uses the latest technical gadgetry to show off a violent and shockingly funny experiment with his cute little pet mouse Carlito.
The Great Refractor, a collaboration with Irish poet and neuroscientist Laurence O'Dwyer, charts the undulating terrain of our attempts to understand the world through both scientific and poetic inquiries. The film contrasts histories of mapping, visualizing and territorializing with contemporary pr
Turn It Upside Down – Sometimes our most deeply held beliefs are exactly what's in the way (Imagination v. the establishment).
Documentary highlighting the importance of patient advocates in cancer research Cancer treatment is changing, and for the better. Two people with a lived experience of cancer bring us through their stories, from diagnosis to now, where they work with others on their cancer journeys. Their stories in
Exchange is a visual and informative illustration of air as the common bond between photosynthetic and respiratory organisms. The exchange of gases in the air -- carbon dioxide for oxygen, and oxygen for carbon dioxide -- between plants and animals is the most fundamental symbiosis on the planet.
Active neurons (in red) and Pyramidal neurons (in green) in the mouse cortex. Credit: Nicolas Renier, The Rockefeller University
Between the microscopic and the macroscopic, the most remote past and the future, this short film investigates the observation practices of the scientists that participated in the exhibition Synapse. Art and Science since Ramón y Cajal at the Museum of the Nobel Foundation in Sweden. The scie
An exploration of what it means to see in color. A student from New York University Abu Dhabi leans on the great painters of our time (Rene Magritte, Paul Cezanne) to understand how color is textured on flat surfaces to create dimensionality. And of course, Magritte's Son of a Man and the apple that
After the death of his grandmother, a Mexican biologist living in New York returns to his hometown nestled in the majestic monarch butterfly forests of Michoacán after many years. The journey forces him to confront past traumas and reflect on his new hybrid identity, launching him on a person
Agronomists as revolutionaries who sought political change through scientific work An archival, animated history of three scientists who became sparks to political and social revolution from within and beyond the lab. Amílcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau, Africa), Nikolai Vavilov (Soviet Union), and
Childhood trauma and stress can lead to the shortening of the chromosome which eventually shortens your life span.
"Not the ghost in the machine, but the body in the medium is the central dilemma of modern communications…" – John Durham Peters The World : In a possible near future, where quantifying of the self is taken to its logical extreme, every person has their own "supermetric". This is an inf
Illuminated and filmed from above, the software detects the position of the mouse head in real-time (indicated in green) and uses this to create a perspective correct virtual reality. The detected mouse contour and centre are shown in magenta. The Lab of Andrew Straw studies neural circuits and beha
The father of neuroscience Santiago Ramón y Cajal wakes up one day with magnified vision. Based on the short story "The Corrected Pessimist" by Santiago Ramon y Cajal Voice over : Carlos Bardem / Brain Images by Jeffrey Lichtman / Animation by Shiv Kachiwala
Various animal species taken from nature and transformed, via taxidermy, into specimens preserved for scientific use; mounted examples in showcases, dried skins and insects in chests of drawers, bones and skulls in boxes. The first specimens collected became the types that identify and gave the name
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 cloud has a phenomenological discussion with itself. Where a cloud ends and "the cloud" begins is a place not for the faint hearted. A journey into the science and philosophy of the nature of our relationship to clouds today. Created for the Symbiosis competition at the 10th Annual Imagine Science
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
A string of amino acids attract and unite in the process of protein folding.