June brings a summer program that dives into the depths of the invisible. With the cellular as a point of departure, these films journey through microbial, molecular, and atomic realms—illuminating what hides beyond the limits of our sight. They play with the power of magnification, revealing hidden architectures of life while blurring the borders between the scientifically precise and the beautifully imagined.

This curatorial lens draws inspiration from Micrographia, Robert Hooke’s 1665 masterpiece—the first book to depict the microscopic world through both scientific observation and artistic illustration. Introducing the term “cell,” Hooke forever changed our relationship to the invisible, fusing rigorous inquiry with visual wonder. His legacy lives on in today’s cinematic explorations that magnify, reimagine, and render visible the worlds within.

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Blood Film (2022)

FILM UK 2022
Karolina Raczynski Andrew Ghobrial

Blood film is an experimental documentary exploring image making, process and interpretation within medical and creative practices. The medical definition of a blood film is a sample of blood which is smeared onto a glass microscopic slide and stained to allow the various blood cells to be examined

Biopixels

FILM United States 2022
Kristina Dutton

Butterflies and moths comprise 12% of all species known to man (180,000 species!), and their seemingly endless biodiversity is visually translated on their wings through color and pattern variation. Incredibly, we humans share these specific wing shaping genes with butterflies, and actually these ma

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Planktonium

FILM The Netherlands 2021
Jan van IJken

Planktonium is a short film about the unseen world of living microscopic plankton. It is a voyage into a secret universe, inhabited by alien-like creatures. These stunningly beautiful, very diverse and numerous organisms are unknown to most of us because they are invisible to the naked eye. However,

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MetaLife: Return to Oneness

FILM Ukraine 2020
Julia Shutkevych / NeoMeta

What if we could hear the voices of the nonhuman others and live in harmony with the ecosphere around us? Can we still restore the damage done to Nature? "MetaLife" is a speculative audiovisual metaphor exploring the potential trajectories of our collective evolution, fostering empathy towards a bal

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Sila, Silap Inua, Silla

FILM Germany 2020
Alisi Telengut

Associated with the exhibition "Critical Zones" at ZKM in Karlsruhe, the work explores the ideas of "sila" and "critical zones" and was created as part an excursion from Filmuniversitaet Babelsberg to ZKM, Germany.

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Stinger (2021)

FILM United States 2021
Brian Zahm

A filmmaker documents his own subtropical parasitic disease... Twenty years ago, I was in Ecuador documenting a U.S. scientific team's fight against Chagas disease. One of the crew from the C.D.C. had a small camera with the ability to record microscopic image video. Fascinated with its capabilities

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Protein Expressions

FILM Italy 2011
Monica Zoppè

In just 4 minutes a group of scientists (active in the fields of protein motion and visual representation of cell biology) will lead you on a journey to discover an entire new world: a human cell.

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U-SCOPIC

FILM United States 2024
Krista Leigh Steinke Meg Cook

Originally created for a Houston city public art project, Steinke and Cook merge the micro with the cosmic in their new film U-SCOPIC. Drawing inspiration from microscopic creatures and audio and imagery from the NASA archives, the artists animate new forms using various experimental techniques. In

95%

FILM France 2016
Marie Coutelier Alexandre Labarussiat

A poetic soaring within a laboratory of genetics . With Marie Coutelier & Nicolas Maille A movie from Marie Coutelier (Scientist) & Alexandre Labarussiat (Filmaker) With the collaboration of Michel Dequet & Nicolas Maille The team thanks l'Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Epinière (ICM) &

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Ballast stowaways dinoflagellates

FILM Canada 2019
Françoise Dugré

In his laboratory, an oceanographer conducts temperature and salinity tests to determine the necessary conditions for the micro-algae Protoceratium reticulatum to survive in the Saint Lawrence Estuary. The filmmaker, moving between the seen and the unseen, follows the scientist as he studies the din

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Live Forever

FILM Australia 2024
Drew Berry

A powers-of-ten plunge into the molecular mechanisms inside an egg cell that reset the biological clock to zero days old. Ageing is an inevitable fact of life. But one type of cell can reset its age to zero and continue as the immortal lineage that will populate our future. "Live Forever" is a multi

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When the dolphins heard the people laugh, they sang. When the people heard the dolphins laugh, they screamed.

FILM United States, India 2025
Tushar Gidwani

Late last year, while photographing a film in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, I noticed a solitary dolphin slowly making its way across a shallow bay. Having never seen one in real life, I was enamoured, but also intrigued: dolphins move in pods - why was this one alone? As it turned out, dolphin and porpo

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Tutto qui

FILM Italy 2022
Anna Marziano

Inspired by the last essay Charles Darwin wrote on the action of worms, I intended to craft a film where the artistic action is placed in continuity with the work of earthworms, digesting and feeding the soil microscopically day after day. The film intertwines direct observation, video projections a

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Squid: Coming to Life

FILM United States 2017
Nipam Patel

Microscopy, timelapse, and observation beautifully captures a lab's full study of squid embryonic development. Original score gives a momentum and underscores the aesthetic beauty of these images and data. Squid Development with music composed and performed by Kristina Dutton and Nathan Clevenger.

Failed Regeneration

FILM United States 2015
Ramin Rahni

Cyan marks the cell membranes in this root, which fails to regenerate after cutting its tip away. Rather than new tissue outgrowth from the center (as in 3 days ), a kind of wound closure takes place. The small outgrowth at the end of this film is evidence of that cell becoming a root hair, a cell t

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Cytoplasmic Playgrounds

FILM UK 2015
Markos Kay

In the incredibly dense yet invisible world of the cytoplasm in biological cells, complex interactions can be thought of as a playful dance between macromolecules, minerals, ions and proteins. These cytoplasmic playgrounds are reimagined using dynamic particle systems that play out and evolve differ

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Littleness (2025)

FILM United States 2025
James Thacher

Littleness uses the scanner as microscope to explore the edge of printed legibility. Animated sympols of "progress" (both evolutionary and techniological) parade across the screen and page.

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The Ecstasy of Microscopy

FILM - 2024
Matthew Ellenbogen

This captivating short documentary takes viewers on a mesmerizing journey into the hidden universe within the human body. Guided by a passionate microscopist, we explore the intricate tapestry of life beneath our skin using stunning visuals captured by cutting-edge microscopes. From the delicate pro

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I-80

FILM United States 2024
Julia Petrocelli

I-80 is a drive on the American road. Dirt and debris concealed in a layer of scotch packing tape, enacted into movement, magnifies the road and its millions of travelers. Following a woman in the privacy of her 2001 Lexus. This film is now on view at the FluxusMuseum in Paros, Greece.

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occhiolino

FILM Austria, Canada 2022
Michaela Grill

Excessive microscopic seeing. That might be the main idea behind the images in occhiolino , Michaela Grill's and Sophie Trudeau's finale to their five-part found footage series. Or rather, behind the appropriated material from a 1920s scientific film that has been condensed here to an enchanting aud

Returning Identities

FILM United States 2015
Ramin Rahni

Cells that are resident specifically to the tip can be cut away completely, and be rebuilt from the remaining tissue as the root regenerates. Here we see two cell types, in green and in cyan, gradually returning to the root tip after having been cut away. (The bright flashes are short bursts of high

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Tears for Lost Frequencies

FILM USA / Turkey 2024
Monica Duncan Senem Pirler

Tears for Lost Frequencies explores our complex relationship with plastic. Our intention is to highlight plastic as a matter that cannot be separated from the "natural": a material everywhere and becoming our "nature" and our "uninvited" collaborator. We ask whether we carry microplastics in our mos

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L’Histoire (History, A story)

FILM Portugal, Germany, United states 2024
Amaranta Kahn Tina Wiegand

In "The Curtain", Kundera said that History (the one of Humanity) has the bad taste to repeat itself; whether art is here to create its own story. In the French language, l'histoire means both History and story. In our modern time but also since the beginning of human history, we are used to both an

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MicroScope

FILM Usa 2012
Minette Mangahas

Filmed through a microscope, this piece superimposes footage from Anna May Wong's performance in the silent film "Piccadilly" (1929) unto a magnified strand of my hair. The film sampled is a scene from "Piccadilly" (1929). Anna May Wong plays a dishwasher in the London theater. The theater director,

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Beautiful Summer (2024)

FILM USA 2024
Jenny Nirgends

Gestures trapped in photographic stillness call to be freed by movement. At their most base form pixels do their dance pretending to be trees. Comprised of 35mm print stills from the family archives of composer Jill Fraser, dating to the midcentury, reenactment and re-photography animate and marry t

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FORMations (2022)

FILM Canada, Palestine 2022
Jude Abu Zaineh

FORMations reflects the natural ecology of food and flora in the region. Sampling the earth, indigenous and collected plant species, and leftover foods, FORMations examines the constant evolution within an ever-shifting cultural and geographical landscape; the petri-dish environment makes visible th

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Physarum Polycephalum

FILM Not Indicated 2013
Anna Sagatov

The slime mold Physarum polycephalum creates beautiful, dendritic fractal patterns, and shows signs of primitive intelligence. Over the past term, I have been working with Mark Lessard of the Jackson Lab's Imaging Department to capture microscopic images and video that showcase the beauty and intell

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Florotica

FILM USA 2017
Gary Greenberg Tom Vendetti

Florotica is a short video that reveals the hidden beauty of flowers through the microscope as never before seen. Dr. Gary Greenberg's 3D microscope shows stamens, pistils, and petals magnified hundreds of times. It exposes what flowers might look like if we were tiny insects living and working insi

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RE-FORM

FILM United States 2021
Danielle Parsons

A microscopic perspective on the endurance of organization. A tug of war between opposite forces of deconstruction and reconstitution plays out on various chemical substances as they recrystallize after being melted and dissolved.

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Prima Materia

FILM United Kingdom 2015
Charlotte Pryce

Delicate threads of energy spiral and transform into mysterious microscopic cells of golden dust: these are the luminous particles of the alchemist's dream. Prima Materia is inspired by the haunting wonderment of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. It is an homage to the first, tentative photographic record

Microscopia (Corps Exquis)

FILM United States 2012
Alexis Gambis

Corps Exquis is an album and live multimedia performance out on New Amsterdam in June of 2013. This segment was directed by Alexis Gambis and is a journey through the microscopic intertwining lands of the organic and inorganic. Praised as one of his generation's "imaginative and skillful creators" (

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Ghost Cell

FILM France 2015
Antoine Delacharlery

A scientific and dreamlike documentary at once, Ghost Cell is a stereoscopic plunge into the guts of an organic Paris seen as a cell through a virtual microscope.

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Tissue (2022)

FILM Finland 2022
Henna-Riikka Halonen

In this film, series of long takes guide us from a fictional prosthetic factory through the nostril, skin and tissue to the nervous system and into the cell. The modified 3D model of an animal cell becomes a strange world inhabited by different living and non-living organisms. Here, we see the body

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Interfacing (2024)

FILM United Kingdom 2024
Daksha Patel

'Interfacing' explores research into lipid membranes at The Biophysical Sciences Institute, University of Durham. In the film, scientists speak about unexpected outcomes in their experiments, and the roles of chance and creativity in their work. Creative coding methods are combined with scientific m

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Melancholia of my Mycelium

FILM Netherlands 2024
Karolina Hyun Wilting

While cleaning the fridge, I found the soffritto pronto my father had preserved in salt before his death—now covered in mould. I could no longer recall his voice, but cooking with it kept his memory alive. But now, not anymore. All of a sudden, the creeping process of my fading memories was ma

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SCALE: The Brain

FILM United States 2025
Tom McNamara

Consider the human brain––a weakly pigmented anatomical complex with wrinkled lobes folded up neatly in your cranium, running on less power than a refrigerator light bulb. The organ manages the most spectacular of human abilities: it thinks. But how?⁠ From Pioneer Works, this is SCALE. ⁠

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I am a Microscope

FILM United States 2024
Karl Nussbaum

This is a 2 channel installation consisting of two separate films made by painting directly onto 35mm film and working with various chemical solvents. The two films are projected side by side and slightly out of sync, creating a type of 'visual stereo' as they make random juxtapositions. The soundtr

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before my beginning

FILM India 2018
Mathew Dominic

Life exists on multiple scales. These are all relative to our own sense of scale - the human scale. There is the macro world, and there is the micro world. before my beginning is an experimental film that kicked off an exploration into the possibility of using macro-micro scales of perspective to ex

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Micro Empire

FILM Austria 2012
Clemens Wirth

…moving on from the Macro Kingdom, we pass through the portal of a microscope to venture into the Micro Empire … surrounding us … inhabiting us … Stranger than fiction… molecular conflict and mitochondrial warfare … a heart-stopping, subcellular epic &hellip

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Immunecraft

FILM United Kingdom 2016
Eric Schockmel Megan MacLeod

Adopting the form of a video game trailer, Immunecraft presents a fictional game which gives users agency over a real life cell culture to compete against opponent players. It explores the parallels between popular gameplay mechanics and some of the most important principles of the human immune syst

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Fossil Lights (2023)

FILM France 2023
Olivier Dadoun Nicolas Darrot

Fossil Lights is a video composed from archival photographs of a particle physics experiment conducted in the 1980s using the BEBC bubble chamber at CERN. By animating these scientific images, the film reawakens a time when the invisible was made visible through the luminous trails of passing subato

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The Big City

FILM Canada 2017
Evan Luchkow

Human activity appears to dominate our planet's urban spaces, but a closer look reveals that we share every corner of our busy cities with trillions of microorganisms. These microscopic investigations of downtown Vancouver reveal the blurry boundary between human society and the natural world.

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There Are Tides in the Bodies

FILM Latvia 2025
Sabīne Šnē

Water has been shaping our existence for as long as there has been an "us" to speak of. It is everywhere and always in motion. Planetary waters and the waters within human bodies merge and mingle, dissolving boundaries between species and ecosystems, and impacting both human and non-human worlds. 'T

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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

Wearing Well

FILM United States 2018
Markos Kay Enrico Milanese

Wearing well is a collaboration between Enrico Milanese, Researcher in Computational Solid Mechanics and Markos Kay, Computational Artist. The film visually reimagines Milanese's research whereby the microscopic effects of contact and wear between materials are studied through the use of high-perfor

Monarch Scales

FILM United States, Mexico, Canada 2019
Alexis Gambis

The first dive-in of a Monarch butterfly wing revealing the intricate scale structure, the pigmented scales, (fuzzy) borders. The borders of the wing evoke the borders between countries, notably between Canada, US and Mexico. The soundscape was created by director Alexis Gambis in collaboration with

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Le sens de la fête (Blowout)

FILM Portugal, United states 2024
Amaranta Kahn

Party and celebrations have always played a central role in our societies and traditions. This is an ode to celebration, joy, music, dance, questioning its limits and frame. The movie was shot with a widefield fluorescence microscope under a 20 X and 40 X objective lens. The music accompanying the a

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Icolette

FILM United States 2023
Sophia Wolfe Christopher Powers

Icolette is a transcendental multimedia experimental film that mirrors natural systems and cycles. The film follows a young girl determined to collect the skin of a fish. In response, the fish fights for its life. Their interaction is curious, intimate, sexual, painful, and ultimately lethal. It is

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The Dark Amin

FILM Italy 2016
Monica Zoppè

The video was prepared for inclusion in a full length documentary titled 'The Dark Gene', produced by FilmTank, and directed by Miriam Jakobs and Gerhard Schick. We have created the animation of the serotoninergic synapse, trying to interpret in visual terms the knowledge available about this very s

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Quantum Fluctuations

FILM UK 2016
Markos Kay

In Quantum Fluctuations, particle simulations are used to visualise the distinct micro-events that occur in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) during a proton collision. Made as a series of conceptual experiments, the film aims to show the complexity and abstract nature of these unobservable aspects of

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Sperm with hooks

FILM USA 2016
Andrew Smith

Sperm with hooks!! I guess make sense when we say: hookup. These are not from the movie alien, they are from a rat. Sperm come in all different shapes and sizes in different species. The differential in sizes and shapes have evolutionary significance. Taken with LabCam on a microscope with Different

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Through the Mirror

FILM United States 2016
Graciela Cassel

Through the mirror was created in a science lab, it is by the interrelation between the eye, the camera, and cells captured through mirrors that a journey develops. Repetition, reflections, movements, and gradient of colors: all traversed the cells, showing how the most minimal part of our bodies re

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2Cent 10Coil

FILM United States 2023
monteith mccollum

Part science, part history, 2cent / 10coil is an exploration into the physical properties of a U.S. postage stamp and the anomalies it presents when subjected to the beam of an electron microscope. Integrated within, are the philosophical musings and speeches of a man in his last weeks of life on a

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The Coffee Ring Effect

FILM United States 2012
Kurtis Sensenig

This never-before-seen footage from a laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Physics and Astronomy shows microscopic particles moving in a drop as it dries. Penn physicists have recently shown that simply changing particle shape can eliminate the ring-shaped stain that is left

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A la recherche de l’autre (Looking for the other)

FILM Portugal, Germany, United states 2024
Amaranta Kahn Tina Wiegand

In modern times, but also since the beginnings of human history, our struggle to "encounter the other" has always been present. Whether it is reflected in the religious and social ideal of the "second-half", whether it is reflected in Don Quichotte fighting for his Dulcinee, or in D'Artagnan looking

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Soundprint

FILM USA 2014
Monteith McCollum

The second film in a trilogy on sound. "SoundPrint" explores the marks left by sonic frequencies. Imagery from optical soundtracks and micro photography of records play against similar signals received by sand, water, and people. Sounds of the ocean and the Midshipman fish are the backdrop for a ric

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Er is een geest van mij

FILM Netherlands, Peru 2021
Mateo Vega

An attempt at mourning both personal and political futures that never arrived, organised around a broad interpretation of the trope of the ghost. We see depersonalised figures, urban ruins, consuming fires and microscopic images of decaying bodily matter; footage was shot in Washington DC, Lima and

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Cellula Filia

FILM Estonia 2022
Piibe Kolka

​A conversation through time between a woman and her great grandmother. Piibe Kolka uses PXL2000 toy camera to record pixelated visuals and various messages on audio cassettes in an attempt to establish a time travelling communication. The film probes an epigenetic hypothesis that individual life ex

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The Interlopers

FILM United States 2017
Gist Croft

Sometimes you see something with the microscope which is not exactly, or not at all what you had intended to see. Yet it is so interesting you spend some time imaging it. In this case, I have no idea what these objects were, pollen, fungal spores, alien lifeforms? They look biological, vaguely menac

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Kosmos (2004)

FILM Germany 2004
Thorsten Fleisch

the mystery of the crystals under closer examination. what is it that makes them possess magic powers as claimed by mystics thorough the ages? by growing crystals directly on film their mystical qualities shine straight to the screen. unfiltered, only aided by light which gracefully breaks its rays

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Andante Micromatic

FILM United States 2025
Danielle Parsons

Magnified between 100-400 times, this video piece by science artist Danielle Parsons reveals the intricate beauty of freshwater pond organisms and fragmented plant structures, collected from an urban water feature. The bright pink backdrop and unexpected, refracted colors emerge from the orthogonal

Writing (2013)

FILM UK 2013
Geraldine Cox

A microscopic observation of physicists' notes and equations jotted on whatever was on hand, bringing us into poignant intimacy with the scientific creative process and the travel of the human mind. Using physicists' notes made on whatever they happened to have at hand – napkins, scraps of pap

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Microsculpture

FILM UK 2016
Tanya Cochrane

Microsculpture is a unique visual experience. The beautifully lit, high magnification portraiture of Levon Biss captures the microscopic form of insects in striking high-resolution detail. The film shows Levon Biss and his pioneering photographic technique as he captures beautifully lit high magnifi

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Revolving Rounds

FILM Austria 2024
Johann Lurf Christina Jauernik

Revolving Rounds is a cyclical film in both form and content. Shot at an agricultural field on the outskirts of Vienna, Johann Lurf and Christina Jauernik's 3D short begins as it ends, tracking a planimetric path alongside three greenhouses as the early morning sun beams across the surrounding lands

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Every Hologenome For Themselves

FILM United States 2020
sister sylvester

"EVERY HOLOGENOME FOR THEMSELVES" is an artist film, created during the first months of lockdown in USA. It uses stories from microbiology, and kitchen-sink bio-hacker techniques to create a series of microscopic stages, and DNA inspired performance scores for the world we live in now.

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Anarchafeminist Divinations

FILM Austria 2024
Işıl Karataş

Anarchafeminist Divinations is an experimental documentary that reimagines the traditional Anatolian practice of coffee-ground fortune-telling, blending it with the photochemical process of chemigramm. While traditional readings focus on heteronormative themes like family and love, the film transfor

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Imágenes Decodificadas de Representaciones Neuronales de un Sueño

FILM Colombia 2021
Carlos Hurtado Múnera

The digital format breaks when trying to replicate neural activity. Rapid eye movements occur in one of the stages of sleep where the body is paralyzed while consciousness is obliged to exist between two dimensions, it is on this frontier that transient images appear leaving an immaterial trace.

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How to Use A Microscope

FILM United States 1982
Ringo Marquez

"How to Use a Microscope," a classic instructional video from the 1980s, is a comprehensive guide tailored specifically for college students. This educational resource delves into the fundamental aspects of microscope usage, covering essential topics such as magnification, resolution, lens adjustmen

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Last Things

FILM United States 2023
Deborah Stratman

The human race is old, but rocks are timeless. Weaving stunning imagery with evocative text and interviews, Last Things observes the history of all of us and this planet Earth through the most essential parts — evolution and extinction, from the POV of rocks. The immensity of our existence is