Science New Wave

Light. Sound. Matter. Intricate landscapes emerge from multitudinous overlapping waves of film and quantum physics. Film created as part of the Symbiosis 2022 competition during the 15th Annual Imagine Science Film Festival around the theme of the Science New Wave.

Another Presence recounts the unique and often curious experiences of people living with dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), the third most common form of dementia in the UK. A multi-sensory condition that can cause dream-like symptoms, it's a condition like no other. Told through the testimonies of th

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

The world is about to end. Maya is forced to go home to the province of Zambales. There, she confronts her childhood house that terrorizes her as frogs rain outside.

In a mysterious forest, a woman is slowly lured into a nostalgic daydream as she observes butterflies.

"Here we teach you to stand in love, rather than fall in it" PRAGMA is an off-beat romantic comedy, set in a Post Graduate Partnering Programme, led by the world's leading practitioner in sustainable love. We follow our protagonist Willow on a series of hilariously intense compatibility assessments

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

A stunning visual exploration of matter in various states of microbial transformation begs fundamental questions about our complicated relationships with other species. Wrought begins with that universal moment of disappointment: despite all best efforts, our food has gone bad. But instead of turnin

Tropical fruits and vegetables radiate on a blizzard-struck street corner in Brooklyn, NY. A visual oxymoron, tugging at the edge of an interconnected and collapsing global order.

Julio is dead. It's terrible news for OVNI Levante, the association of ufology aficionados that he ran. The death hits one its members, José Manuel, particularly hard. Julio and he had a secret project to change human destiny. Now he must carry on alone.. José Manuel and the other memb

Language is a visible organic material. It has the particular feature of being transparent and of allowing a passage through. Language as a material unfolds in its own environment between different states : as a magma or as crystallized shapes. Then, a prosody emerges and tries to define itself.

Exposition of two different processes of forensic identification in exhumed bodies with signs of violence.

A purple and orange fluid spreads in volutes in the maritime estuary of the St. Lawrence. Between visual ballet and lyrical flights, Release plunges us into an enigmatic and sensory experience.

This audiovisual essay advocates imagination through a travelogue of constructed and anonymous landscapes. It is a note about the future. Narratives that intertwine in the interstices between the visual, the auditory, and the expressed, speak about loss, exploration, presence, vigilance, responsibil

Brief reflections with AI on the nature of memory. Film created as part of the Symbiosis 2022 competition during the 15th Annual Imagine Science Film Festival around the theme of the Science New Wave.

Argentinian poet Fabian Casas wrote that everything which rots forms a family. There are two families in this film, each mirroring the other, but time is not there to orchestrate a decomposition. When things end abruptly and unintentionally, they leave a void that resembles a cliff; a movement sudde

Derek Dabkoski enrolls in a year long, double blind medical study of the effects of modified stem cell surgery to treat traumatic brain injuries in the hopes he might regain the function lost after the brutal mugging that left him partially paralyzed on his right side. What he discovers, ultimately,

During a cosmic event, a tree transmits a strange disease to a girl. Both organisms are linked by a mysterious bond through time until the moment of their death.

A short film about existence and sentience. Satirical in tone, the film chronicles evolution and the development of the carnivore.

In the courtyard of the Air Bel primary school in Marseille, during recess, the boys take up much more space than the girls to play football. The girls have had enough! They decide to mobilize, and a team of reporters goes out into the field to meet the students to find out what actions have been pu

A lonely couple downloads a new technology that allows them to unveil the spirit realm through their smartphone, only to discover that they aren't as lonely as they thought.

A desert landscape, as if from another planet. A few lonely, rusty shipwrecks. Low desert scrub grows around them to hold the sand together during the merciless storms. Aralkum, the Aral Desert, is the bare seabed, the last thing left of the Aral Sea. By weaving together different cinematic textures

"[…] 'alles Nahe werde fern,' everything near becomes distant. Goethe was referring to the evening twilight. Everything near becomes distant. It is true. At nightfall, the things closest to us seem to move away from our eyes. So the visible world has moved away from my eyes, perhaps forever."

Ants, earthworms, bees, butterflies and woodlice are the heroes of this animated short. From the drawings they have made, a group of children tell us about the development, the places of life, and the roles that these insects have within the ecosystem of which they are a part.

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

A furious and silent hurricane is about to reach a village in the Latin American tropical forest. A grandmother and her grandson are elected to travel and give themselves as offerings. Sacred songs and an arduous walk revive the hope of the commune to survive the natural disaster.

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

Making the invisible, visible! Images of butterfly wings at the microscopic scale are stunning, and at the nanoscopic scale they become otherworldly. The colorful images in the animated short Nanoscapes were taken with light and electron microscopes at magnifications up to 50,000x. From iridescent b

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

This is a satirical review of our times. Suzi doll is an ego-warrior. My online avatar, marching to the algorithms of social media. She is lit by temporary outrage. A trending indignation. A passion that is fashion. A politics of the popular. Her activism is abstract. Her help is hypothetical. We kn

A telescope is the incarnation of the abyss staring into itself [...] the subject, a telescopic lens through which the incomplete world develops a self-consciousness of itself." (Reza Negarestani). Film created as part of the Symbiosis 2022 competition during the 15th Annual Imagine Science Film Fes

Chemical Somnia is a visual exploration of phase transition, fluid dynamics, and chemical reactions. Timelapse and high speed photography were used to capture these elemental relationships in less then a square inch of a petri dish.

Cell Worlds is a journey to the heart of the microscopic living world. It is an unprecedented discovery of a hidden biodiversity: our cells. A journey of introspection and emotion to discover unsuspected microscopic forms, colors and behaviors. Migrations, hunts, symbioses and even communications, w

As her team digitises the traces of an unidentified creature, a palaeontologist mourns a loved one. A meditation on preservation, daughter of discovery and mother of loss.

The global problem of light pollution is growing exponentially every year, but we have not found a real solution to solve it yet. The problem that negatively affects the lives of animals and plants, the work of astronomers, but most of all the health of each of us, although we are not aware of it, y

Helena is a 17-year-old student in Finland. Her father is Swedish, and her mother is originally from the Kichwa people of Sarayaku, who live in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon. On a recent trip there, Helena participates in the traditional Uyantza Raymi cultural festival, and meets with Kichwa le

An Animated Conversation with the late, great theoretical physicist & Nobel Laureate, Steven Weinberg. Excerpts from interviews recorded between 2020 & 2021.

If the Moon could speak, what would it say? A commercially-driven, international Space Race has propelled us to this moment in the 21st century: within a few years, the Moon's surface may be subject to permanent human occupation, its resources aggressively mined for profit, and its ancient nature-sp

A former cowboy turned janitor with an eighth-grade education, Milt Humason forms an unlikely friendship with astronomer Edwin Hubble and assists him at Mt. Wilson Observatory, a partnership that leads to their discovery that the universe is expanding.

Celluloid film is reconfigured into a graphic musical score, with obscure narratives emerging as the film is reanimated. 35mm, 16mm, std 8mm, super 8mm and 9.5mm gauge films are hand edited, glued, taped and scraped together into one continuous 6 meter collage, before digital stop motion brings the

At the age of six, Emily Whitehead was diagnosed with leukemia and the lives of her and her parents were suddenly thrust into uncertainty. Through bracingly honest interviews and home videos, Of Medicine and Miracles details her family's experience bouncing from hospital to hospital, trying to stay

Two bears are hungry in NYC. Hungry for salmon. Follow Big Bear and Little Bear's respective expeditions through the city in search of a scrumptious meal. From lavish fine dining to lively food carts – through the simple act of eating – the relationship between bears and salmon enables t

In 2019 an iron meteorite was filed to dust, stirred into cream, and fed to 36 people. Flis's uterus was rife with tumours soon after. Their belly swelled as a fleshy block pushed its way out at astonishing speed. From the first poke of a finger, to WebMD, to x-rays, every diagnostic tool came up sh

A demon enters the frequencies of a song as it's being recorded and possesses the musician, who vomits out the sound. The sound then sends the musician on a wild goose chase from the roof of her house to the city, farmlands, the desert and, finally, the beach—where she collapses from exhaustio

A Letter from Yene emerges from conversations with the community in the seaside town of Yene, Senegal, where Diawara lives for part of the year. The area was traditionally and primarily occupied by fishermen and farmers but has in recent decades been besieged by coastal erosion and uncontrolled urba

Terrain Vague is a 16mm photo-roman, based on the images and accompanying log of a fictional female researcher who, over the summer of 2016, chronicles the development of a new private, university-based innovation center from the shell of a former color and coatings laboratory in a poor and working

Emi, a young girl with a stomach upset, enters the magical, microscopic world inside a zebrafish and aids the defenders of her cells to outwit the invading Shigella bacteria. At a time when there is increased anxiety around the viral attack on our cells by Coronavirus, this enchanting fairytale film

In an evicted apartment, a ghost-like presence remembers its luminous past and its progression towards its current state of decay. It yearns to be what it once was.

In 2011, Lisa Hepner and her husband Guy Mossman heard about a radical stem cell treatment for diabetes, a disease that shockingly kills more than five million people each year. Driven by a desire to cure Lisa of her own type 1 diabetes (T1D), the filmmakers were given unprecedented, real-time acces

Eastern white pines submerged under the waters of a hydroelectric reservoir on unceded Innu territory transform into flames. This exploration between water and fire illustrates our current climate emergency through multiple stories about the relationship between a community and it's land.

Mike fails a CAPTCHA and now must prove that he is human. Film created as part of the Symbiosis 2022 competition during the 15th Annual Imagine Science Film Festival around the theme of the Science New Wave.

Quarries follows the mysteries surrounding prehistoric stone tools from Kenya alongside the neglected labor of stonemasons who paved the streets of Lisbon. The humble gesture of these artisans, stooped over the pavement, morphs into a confrontation with the hubristic act of monument building. For th

The zoo in Salzburg, Austria is open to visitors 365 days a year. In the spring of 2020, when the first Covid lockdown brought life almost to a standstill, the zoo had to close its doors to the public for the first time in its existence. Like actors in a theater, it is the animals at a zoo that attr

In this cavalcade of cameos, the souls of celebrities are ensnared in robot bodies and forced to be at the beck and call of a keeper obsessed with the fictional personas that made them famous.

"Sincerely Yours" is a portrait of representation in science centered on the developmental biologist Ethel Browne Harvey and her work with sea urchins. Positioning the camera lucida–a drawing device foundational to the history of biology–as both an instrument of scientific visualization

Set in a botanical glasshouse, Hybrid Terrains brings vegetal and human bodies into dialogue. With an audio created from electromagnetic signals emitted by plants, the work seeks a non anthropocentric approach to filmmaking. The film invites you to observe, sense and question our relationship with t

The "Carlo Colla & Figli Puppet Company" is one of the most ancient and famous puppet companies in the world. The Company's Atelier in Milan houses more than three thousand puppets. Each has a face, a body and specific characteristics, which makes it unique. "Diteggiatura" recounts, in a reverse chr

When coming out to his traditional parents, Sid uses his time machine to reset the day trying to make sure everything goes perfect.