Each year, the Science New Wave designates 64 films, mirroring the 64 codons of the genetic code. Each film receives its own genetic barcode, inscribing it into the evolving DNA of the movement. Together, they form a living sequence of cinema—stories that mutate, recombine, and carry forward the traits of science in film.
This year’s sequence draws from the 18th Annual Science New Wave Festival, Symbiosis collaborations between scientists and filmmakers, works from the SNW Luminary Residency in Paris, Labocine Originals, and curated selections. Collectively, they map the diverse expressions of science storytelling today, each imprinted with the genetic signature of the Science New Wave.
This November Issue is more than a retrospective: it is a genetic record of the year in science cinema, where inquiry and imagination co-author the script, and cinema itself evolves like a living organism.
Note: Not all of these films are available for viewing in November, as many continue their festival and distribution journeys. However, all are eligible for the Science New Wave Luminary Awards, with voting by the Luminaries taking place throughout November. Winners will be announced in early December.
Here's the Voting Ballot for Luminaries
The Mirs are a Muslim community of musicians from the Thar Desert region in western Rajasthan, one of the most densely populated arid areas in the world. The landscape here consists of shifting dunes, short monsoons, and a constant struggle for water. For centuries, the Mirs have preserved poetry an
Plastic Aortas is a portrait of the black plastic encasing the Fells Reservoir in the unceded land of the Massachusett, Pawtucket, and Naumkeag indigenous peoples. The lining was placed there by conservationists in order to mitigate the invasive Common Reed, which is killing native plants. However,
Centred on sphagnum moss, Translocations highlights the mutual aid and reciprocal exchange that exists between species in the restoration of a lowland peatbog. Featuring the voice of botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer, and a tactile soundtrack score, the film documents the human and more-than-h
After the sixth great extinction, humans lost their connection to nature, roaming through the ruins of past civilizations. The survivors became nomads, hiding in temporary settlements erected in what remains of the forests. A lone wanderer deciphers cryptic messages delivered by someone unseen withi
"Liquid crystal has seeped everywhere and it has hardened into forms that have made themselves indispensable to modern life. This liquid crystal phase can form itself into any form," writes Esther Leslie in her book Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form. Inspired by her theories on li
Fragmented records reveal a concealed history of Cold War–era human radiation experiments, surfacing through a haze of manipulation and embedded studies. Desert dust settles into teeth, inscribing a residual record. Contaminated images conjure the unseen.
A moving image and sound portrait of the aura; seizures in focused parts of the brain that result in sensory, physical and emotional disturbances, sometimes acting as warnings for convulsive seizures that may occur. Told through the voices of individuals who experience this phenomena, the film provi
What if the rock could be a lens? And if it's not a question of if, but when? Braided Sand considers the geologic materiality of imaging and communication technologies. There is no glass lens without sand, which itself is the result of millions of years of geologic activity. Filmed at a sand mine, a
Glittering illusions of vectorized providence attempt to emulate an inherited physical realm of diminishing significance.
In a remote area of northern Spain, the wind known as Tramuntana sweeps through landscapes and communities, uprooting trees, boats, clothes, and even lives. Told through lyrical narration and villagers' stories, the film creates an intimate portrait of this formidable natural force and the landscape
Deep furrows in the first light of dawn. Or is it the evening twilight that's revealing these lunar landscapes that open-pit mining has left behind? On the horizon, the towers of two power plants throw clouds of exhaust fumes into the air while the still active, steel mining giants flash persistentl
From the Mountain We See the Mountain blends haunting imagery and whispered myth to explore a land marked by ecological trauma and the colonial experience. As animals and humans cautiously re-emerge after a forest fire, rumours swirl: was it an accident, an act of nature, or something more insidious
Two scientists from the Technomystic Ecology Lab develop technology that processes the ecological grief contained within a database of audio testimonials. In their lab, located deep inside a cave, they alchemize these feelings into a seed archive for an unknown future.
In a remote Chinese village, a peasant family endured wars, the communist revolution, and the deadliest famine. Persecution and hardship eventually forced the family to scatter. Against the backdrop of China's rapid urbanization, the filmmaker sets out to unearth her family's enduring bond with this
Beyond the 20 is a poetic science essay film that explores the natural boundary between the built environment in New York city and the design challenges in molecular engineering. Shot primarily on Super 8, the film layers nostalgic texture with speculation, imagining a world beyond the canonical 20
In 1982, six rural communities across the United States were notified that all of the nation's nuclear waste might be buried beneath them forever. Each candidate site was studied in detail by the Department of Energy's scientists and bureaucrats, in a process met with distress and resistance. A comp
Molecular Duet brings to life the dynamic world of microtubules, the cell's structural filaments that assemble and disassemble in a rhythm scientists call dynamic instability. This is an exploration through the lens of both microscopy and molecular simulations with a poetic visual storytelling. The
Soil is our closest alien world. STRATA INCOGNITA, is a trans-scalar and trans-temporal journey across the geographies that articulate soil as an agro-industrial infrastructure, but also as an ecosystem and a somatic archive of crimes, memories and myths.
Between There and Here focuses on researchers who study Icelandic hot springs as an analogue to geothermal locations on Mars as they might have been millions of years ago.
In Excess examines labor, capital, and displacement in modern America through the lens of one city's trash — in sewers and streets, waterways and workplaces. It's a gritty dive into the inner workings of a city's infrastructure that embraces different formats, weaving newly digitized archival
The Call is an eco-revenge film featuring unlikely instigators who were observed and filmed over three years at airports across the United States.
Nemo is the name of the famous captain in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, named by Jules Verne after the latin word meaning "no one, nobody". On the shores of Chittagong, Bangladesh, the cargo ship NEMO 1 is beached amongst hundreds of others. A journey towards steel giants being recycled by
Soil Story is a 16mm film, combining found foliage and an experimental approach to the film developing process that is in collaboration with the environment. The film explores the juxtaposing histories and memories of the ridgewood reservoir and the cemetery belt. Two locations that straddle each ot
In this immersive sonic and visual experience, centered around the return of the American Great Eastern Brood X cicadas, a long distance conversation between two friends becomes the lifeline of an unfinished film. Measuring time through the cicadas' return provides a pulse for a post-pandemic moment
A fictional mythological movie about the birth and death of our planet. The movie shows things happening on the planet through the eyes of two naive god figures; a wild girl who has the power of creation, and a shy boy who has the power of destruction. This is not a fight between "bad" and "good", b
In a near-future world, strangers' lives intertwine as they grapple with technology's impact on relationships and identity, exploring profound questions of human connection amidst alienation.
Witness: An Organima Film' is an experimental animation short film that captures the sentience in small life-forms: ancient beings on stone, an intelligent water droplet, and spirits of sunlight. Crafted with a novel animation approach that asks natural materials to guide their own story, elemental
In Venezuelan Guayana, large gold reserves lie beneath "moriche" palms, attracting multitudes of miners from across the region. A fictional narrator travels from far-flung mines in the jungle to the banks of the Orinoco River, trying to understand the uncertain fortune of the informal miner immersed
Experience that transforms the M100 GAV into a large film set for a feature film, where audiences will be able to witness the filming and participate in unexpected ways.
An Atlas of Mineralogy is an illustrated inventory of the inanimate materials that shape the Earth's surface. As James D. Dana observed in Manual of Mineralogy (1857), "The very existence of many of the arts of civilized life depends upon the materials which the rocks afford," highlighting our endur
A brother and sister are hibernating. Only the sister wakes up. Human hibernation blurs the boundary between people and animals. A thought experiment equal parts sci-fi and meditation shot in searing images.
An account of a scientist trying to teach machines how to infer depth from two-dimensional pictures. A parable of a prince trying to resurrect his lover by fashioning a chair out of his lover's things. A question about the need for human beings, and the things they are in need of.
Carried by an immersive sonic universe, this film offers a sensitive journey through memory, perception, and resistance. It invites us to listen differently to lives transformed by war.
A spectre is haunting the city - a spectre of a cryptic ghost. In the liminal, neglected areas of Ljubljana, lurks the spectre of a striped hyena - a ghost of an animal that fled from the travelling menagerie in 1898. After her escape she managed to lurk around the periphery of the city for several
Previously unheard voices are manifest on recordings. Extinct flora/fauna provide raw materials for magnetic video/audio-tape. Media archaeology reveals deeper content.
Chemical Meadows is an experimental documentary linking water chemistry and photochemistry in the post-industrial wilds of the New Jersey Meadowlands. A paradoxical estuary wilderness three miles from Manhattan and more than half its size, marred by landfills and chemical corporations yet a recoveri
Disembodied movie fragments mutate into a lurid looping graphical landscape where captive movie actors witness the ensuing disorder as they descend into a celluloid maelstrom.
"Sandcastles" parallels two Singapores: one in Southeast Asia, and one buried on the western coast of Michigan. On top of sharing the same name, these two places also share a fraught relationship with sand. Singapore, Michigan was a thriving lumber town in the late 19th century until erosion from ma
The director continues his mission to explore and push the boundaries of our sensory perception in new and surprising ways. In The Electric Kiss algorithmically generated images are harmoniously paired with a tantalising score by Jung An Tagen.
Sky Sweat Star Spit is a multi-species love song tuned to the ecstatic and grotesque textures of existence. Born from the American experimental tradition, it's a fever dream that meditates on transformation, dissolution, and the blur between the spiritual and the bodily. Adapted from a passage on th
Through the principles of hinge protein design, How to Connect Two Bodies is an experimental documentary exploring the invisible choreography in meaningful connections of objects across various scales. This film was created as part of Symbiosis 2025, which took place from May 5 to May 19, 2025. The
A poetic exploration of three subterranean telescopes in remote regions of Canada, Japan, and Antarctica that reveal a new way of perceiving the universe from within. Underground, we are dreaming into the earth. 'Messengers' was shot in cooperation with the groundbreaking particle physics collaborat
Cosmographies is a hybrid film that draws from modes of speculative fiction, observational and poetic documentary, activism, and Indigiqueer approaches. Māori astrobiologist Xuê Noon (played by Australian/Māori artist Victoria Hunt) finds solace in Mars in 2051 as a leader from the Aotearoa Sp
Set within a day's natural cycle in a sentient forest, a deeper interconnectedness is threatened by an external force when darkness falls. Through shifting perspectives viewers are invited on a sensory journey bridging science and poetry, inspired by scientific papers on mother trees by professor Su
A field guide: Flora evolving with environmental changes, and pollinators utilizing biomimicry. Natural objects are gathered, and sculptures of and from the landscape cast reflections of nature being infinite, self-knowing, and alive. Extinct species and stages of evolution are suggested, accompanie
Scientists and philosophers encounter the limits of their own vision through the eyes of animals.
An observation of the California Spiny Lobster ( Panulirus interruptus ) through a series of disparate environments, from aboard fishing vessel to the halls of a research laboratory. Throughout its journey, the many ways that the lobster is made into a subject come to the forefront, inviting new way
Between Lines and Light is an experimental animation project that explores the interplay between structure and imagination, inspired by the rich cultural and architectural textures of Paris. Using laser etching on black film leader, the work transforms simple geometric patterns into surreal, otherwo
A historic event of sound and light. What is the nature of experiencing global phenomena in today's interconnected world?
When a Palestinian filmmaker based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wild flowers, he decides to reclaim the footage. This tender essay film questions the role of image-making as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between peopl
R/P FLIP R.I.P. is an experimental video about the R/P FLIP (Floating Instrument Platform), the world-famous nautical rarity that flips 90 degrees to become a live-in buoy for studying the ocean. During the Cold War, the FLIP was designed for stability to study acoustics in a turbulent ocean, yet ir
In a world where ex-partners have to swap a chosen body part after breaking up, someone rediscovers their former ear on someone else. A journey towards self-acceptance begins.
Valeria works in a nocturnal flower shop where the plants emit eroticism. In her circle of friends, some humans have long, pointed ears, others have wings. Filmmaker Magaly Ugarte de Pablo tells a supernatural tale with roots in the Mexican fantasy tradition and a futuristic gender perspective. A go
Inspired by the surrealist method of exquisite corpse, this experimental film unravels the story of a Harris mud crab found perfectly preserved on the Baltic Sea shore—a creature alien to these waters until its arrival in Estonia in 2011. The crab's journey, likely via ballast water across the
a lifetime of surgeries continues with an upgrade in battery life and a downgrade in scar tissue when the filmmaker has his original pacemaker replaced after sixteen years.
The more she studies dark matter, the more a lonely astrophysics student must confront the gravity of her inner world. The film follows a protagonist (Manuel Elkaslassy Vardi, V.O: Lucia A. Perez) as her subconscious wrestles with understanding her place in the world—and within the vastness of
In an office in New York City, Dr Carrie Filion makes galaxies sing. Using sonification, she builds up an audible representation of our universe, adding a whole new dimension to how we perceive space. This film was created as part of Symbiosis 2025, which took place from May 5 to May 19, 2025. The p
People congregate at a well on the southern edge of the desert. In a brutal drought, the vast majority of livestock have died. The nearest village used to be spotted with grass huts along the horizon, but these have been taken apart to feed cattle.
MELT: the memory of ice is a visually mesmerizing cinematic song cycle, a powerful and contemplative invitation to sit bedside in communion with our earth's body melting and spilling through climate change. Created during a summer the composer/director spent in Greenland with her mother and 5-year-o
Far off in the universe, two black holes smash into each other and send waves through space time. Waves that we can't feel, can't touch, and are hard to predict. So who cares? Lieke van Son walks through the streets on Manhattan to reveal ways these gravitational waves are already a part of your dai
In the still waters of the Gulf, invisible cities drift — diatoms, silent engineers of glass, constructing worlds too small for the eye, too vast for comprehension. The Silica Sea is a dialogue between the microscopic and the monumental, where the breath of the ocean meets the hum of concrete.
'How Now, House?' investigates our yearning to leave traces behind through the prism of one house in Rotterdam. Using archives, personal memories and the philosophy of time, the film questions whether a space can ever really belong to one person, or time period, at all.
A person is in the flow. They make a decision and keep flowing until all becomes one.
In OBSERVER, filmmaker Ian Cheney embarks on an experiment in which he brings a series of keen-eyed observers - scientists, artists, a hunter - to a range of locations around the world, often without telling them where they are going, and asks them simply to describe what they see. What unfolds is a