Science New Wave Festival XVII

The Universe in a Grain of Sand

Mark Alan Levinson

<p>Opening Night Film of the <a href="https://www.imaginesciencefilms.org/snw17/opening"><strong>Science New Wave Festival XVII</strong></a> / October 18 - 7pm - Museum of the Moving Image</p> <p>A meditation by the award-winning filmmaker/physicist Mark Levinson (PARTICLE FEVER) on how we make sense of the world around us. Using the works of artists instead of explanatory animations, the visually rich film explores how both scientists and artists use their understanding of nature to create new tools and representations to probe the deepest mysteries of the universe.</p>

Apple Cider Vinegar

Sofie Benoot

<p>Stones are at once the most foundational and the most overlooked parts of our lifeworld. When a retired nature documentary narrator passes a kidney stone, she decides to tell one more story about this forgotten world of stone . A hypnotic essay film asking urgent ecological questions, Apple Cider Vinegar takes the viewer on a journey meeting Palestinian quarry workers, passionate Britisch Geologist and People living on the lava fields of Fogo.</p>

Parallel Botany

Magdalena Bermudez

<p>Still lives of real fruit meet botanical illustrations of plant galls to expose the paradox of dissection: each time we cut something in two, we merely create a new exterior.</p>

Wild Summon (2023)

Karni Arieli Saul Freed

<p>A natural history fantasy film, following the dramatic lifecycle of the wild salmon in human form, with narration by Marianne Faithfull.</p>

The Everlasting Pea

Su Rynard

<p>Through the eyes of a scientist questioning plant consciousness, a pea plant dreaming of its past in Rome&rsquo;s Colosseum, and a botanist unravelling a mystery, The Everlasting Pea invites a profound reimagining of our relationship with the vegetal world.</p>

Log From Site A

Marina Luccioni

<p>Set in Tucson, Arizona &quot;Log from site A&quot; is a short experimental documentary about science and the use of deconstruction and fragmentation to understand relationships. Two students study the toxicity of Sonoran Desert toads in the midst of a dry year, lacking monsoon rains. This is the flip-book of things they found, but couldn&rsquo;t explain, with their science. We offer a film although really what we owe is a song to the Tucson desert.</p>

perfectly a strangeness

Alison McAlpine

<p>In the dazzling incandescence of an unknown desert, three donkeys discover an abandoned astronomical observatory and the universe. A sensorial, cinematic exploration of what a story can be.</p> <p><em>The film received the Theme-Sensitive Award at the Science New Wave Festival XVII in 2024. This distinction honors a work that most vividly embodies the year&rsquo;s festival theme &mdash; SIGNAL &mdash; bringing it to the screen in a singular and resonant way. The award includes a cash prize of $500. Learn more about our <a href="https://www.sciencenewwave.com/awards">SNW Luminary Awards</a>.</em></p>

Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya

Malena Szlam

<p>&ldquo;Archipelago of Earthen Bones &mdash; To Bunya&rdquo; traces alternative cartographies of time, rooted in the very geologic formations of our planet. Examining volcanic time as a means to comprehend and express Earth&rsquo;s geological history, the film seeks a sensing and knowing that recognizes the divergent nature of the time scales that surround us. From almost instantaneous catastrophic ruptures to the formation of mountains over millions of years, the film invites us to become immersed in time.</p> <p>Using tectonic plates as imaginary maps, Szlam films a constellation of ancient landforms, from the eroded vestiges of volcanic activity to the relics of the Gondwana Rainforest, tracing a path along the central eastern ranges of Australia, which were illuminated in the afterglows of the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai eruption. Szlam films on 16mm and edits in-camera, creating dazzling landscapes through multiple exposures. The vibrations, murmurings and signals of Earth form the soundscape composed by Australian artist Lawrence English. &ldquo;Archipelago of Earthen Bones &mdash; To Bunya&rdquo; evokes the layered histories of Mount Beerwah to the titular Bunya Mountains, rendering a unique perspective on the shifting faces of our environments.&nbsp;</p>

Eventual Horizon

Elise Guillaume

<p>‬Filmed in the Arctic, Eventual Horizon threads together the artist&rsquo;s experience of insomnia, grief, and hope. In this viscerally engaging film, a parallel is made between the experience of mourning a loved one and ecological degradation. Perceiving grief as an active element of hope, Eventual Horizon focuses on the transformative and healing power of these states. The film&#39;s soundscape is created from Arctic field recordings, capturing the sound of ice melting though a hydrophone and the vibrations emitted by ice using a geophone.</p>

Puffling

Jessica Bishopp

<p>Young women on a remote island off Iceland help lost puffins, who easily lose their bearings.&nbsp;<em>&ndash; DeWitt Davis</em></p>

Infinite Summer

Miguel Llansó

<p>On a summer break, Mia and her friends try a meditation app that delivers a mind-bending experience. Police investigation reveals darker forces behind it. When one of the girls ends up in a hospital and the other one escapes, Mia is grappling with the choice to save them or join them.</p>

The Gloria of your Imagination

Jennifer T Reeves

<p>Sixty years ago, a 30-year-old waitress and single mother, was persuaded to engage in psychotherapy sessions on film, with three of the most influential Theorist-Psychologists of the 20th century. Reeves newest dual-projection film breaks down and expands this widely viewed work &ldquo;Three Approaches to Psychotherapy&rdquo; with an intricate superimposed montage of scenes from Gloria&rsquo;s unguarded sessions and numerous film artifacts of her lifetime: newsreels, home movies, commercials, a beauty pageant, cold war propaganda, and educational films from the 1930s-1970s.</p> <p>Sixty years ago, a 30-year-old waitress and single mother, was persuaded to engage in psychotherapy sessions on film, with three of the most influential Theorist-Psychologists of the 20th century. Reeves newest dual-projection film breaks down and expands the seminal film series Three Approaches to Psychotherapy with an intricate superimposed montage consisting of material from Gloria&rsquo;s unguarded sessions and numerous film artifacts of her lifetime: newsreels, home movies, commercials, a beauty pageant, cold war propaganda, and educational films from the 1930s-1970s.</p> <p>The Gloria of your Imagination immerses audience members in an unabashed patriarchal, nationalistic era which many U.S. conservatives are working tirelessly to recreate. Social and legal limitations of that era, which formed Gloria and the struggles of her generation, remain unacknowledged in the sessions. While the therapists seem progressively non-judgmental about Gloria&rsquo;s active sex life, there is no mention that contraceptives are actually illegal for her to take. Reeves&rsquo; original intertitle script fills in missing context and introduces Gloria&rsquo;s greater life and self: from her Polish-Catholic upbringing to marriage straight from high school to an ever-evolving single parent on a spiritual journey, living by her own principles, until an untimely death at 46 years of age.</p> <p>By projecting films that Gloria could have seen in their original 16mm format, on top of portions from Gloria&rsquo;s psychotherapy sessions, viewers absorb the culture of that era directly. Original 16mm shot by Reeves, and footage doctored with her signature Direct-on-film techniques, bring about viewers&rsquo; subjective experiences and visceral connections to Gloria&rsquo;s inner experience. The &ldquo;three Glorias&rdquo; put on display by therapists with vastly divergent methods and conclusions, are displaced by the Glorias viewers experience, and perhaps by the courageous and determined individual imagined by the filmmaker.</p> <p>Director Biography -&nbsp;Jennifer T Reeves</p>

La Laguna del Soldado (The Soldier's Lagoon)

Pablo Álvarez-Mesa

<p>Reflecting on the construction of oral history and its relation to the land, The Soldier&rsquo;s Lagoon dives into the misty P&aacute;ramo region and offers an elusive living archive that navigates the dense fog separating Sim&oacute;n Bol&iacute;var&rsquo;s past and Colombia&rsquo;s present.</p>

We Are Not Alone

Adebukola Bodunrin

<p>Wumni, a reclusive young Nigerian immigrant, becomes convinced that a mysterious object approaching Earth's orbit holds the key to her loneliness. Determined to decode the alien signal, she enlists the help of Jenny, a stranger and owner of a music shop. Adapted from the short comic by award-winning graphic novelist and screenwriter, Ezra Claytan Daniels, We Are Not Alone is a lo-fi sci-fi tale that delves into themes of connection, expectation, and false promises. Shot on salvaged Ektachrome stock, this live-action film utilizes experimental animation techniques, including laser etching directly onto film, to immerse viewers in a world buzzing with texture.</p>

The Wool Aliens

Julia Parks

<p>In her masterful 16mm ethnographic essay, the director investigates the story of an early twentieth century botanist Ida Hayward, who discovered peculiar connections between sheep&rsquo;s wool, migratory plant seeds and the River Tweed in Scotland. An extremely well made film about a surprising confluence of themes &ndash; the global wool industry, colonialism, the fraught interconnectedness of fauna and the region in which it is set.</p>

Re-Entry (2024)

Ariel Mahler

<p>35 years ago, Maya Redding, a male-presenting NASA engineer, and her best friend George, launched a satellite to study the origins of the universe. The satellite got lost in the wrong orbit, forcing Maya to leave NASA in shame. In the years since, Maya came out as trans, and has been searching for the satellite ever since. When she re-discovers the satellite, Maya is haunted by the memory of her painful, closeted past. Will she bring the satellite&rsquo;s data back to NASA and return to her former life? Or will she let her past burn up, like the satellite&rsquo;s re-entry into the Earth&rsquo;s atmosphere?</p>

The Veiled City

Natalie Cubides-Brady

<p>In 1952, London was engulfed in the Great Smog. As a result of industrialisation, a leaden fog settled over the entire city. The archive images from this period become letters from a desolate future.</p>

1976: Search for Life

Tess Martin

<p>A new father visits the hometown of his mother in 1976, accompanied by his wife and baby. At the same time, the NASA Viking lander is sending the first images back to Earth from the surface of another planet. Using the father&rsquo;s travel journal as a guide, and re-contextualizing archival footage and photographs, this film explores our yearning to bridge the gap: the gap between parents and children, between points in space and between the present and the past.</p>

3 MWh

Marie-Magdalena Kochová

<p>A nuclear power plant worker obsessed with counting has set a maximum limit on how much electricity he wants to consume until the end of his life. In this grim but masterful 35mm film-poem with strong mathematical undercurrents, Marie-Magdalena Kochov&aacute; presents to us a story of a man whose life is moving towards transformation. A loving acceptance of the fact that we are not just our bodies, but energy too.</p> <p><em>&ndash; Ivan Ramljak</em></p>

A Body Called Life (2024)

Spencer MacDonald

<p>A self-isolated young human known as &quot;James&quot; delves into the hidden world of microscopic organisms, forging a tender connection with these nearly invisible creatures and developing a massive online following, as he seeks to understand his own place in the cosmos and accept the scars of his past.<br /> <br /> &ldquo;A Body Called Life&rdquo; is a film made in collaboration with James, with a screenplay adapted from the verbatim Instagram posts of James, and starring James as James. It is an experiment in storytelling, about a life spent observing other little lives, with a charming score by Dan Deacon.</p>

Algorithms of Beauty

Miléna Trivier

<p dir="ltr">A contemplative film about the boundaryies between natural and technological beauty. Can an AI-generated image recreate the beauty of a flower?</p> <p dir="ltr">In 1772, artist Mary Delany imitated flowers through decoupage. By pasting together hundreds of paper cuttings, she managed to depict flowers with exquisite botanical precision. Centuries later, a programmer is working to invent an algorithm that can also replicate the patterns and radiance of fauna. With the help of an artificial intelligence, the beauty of plants is recreated down to the smallest detail. The technology is groundbreaking, even though reproducing nature is not new. &lsquo;Algorithms of Beauty&rsquo; moves across science and beauty, technology and emotion in its examination of the AI inventions of our time, questioning the limits of our vision. Can we tell the difference between a computer-generated image of a flower and the real thing?</p> <p dir="ltr">Can a picture contain all the beauty of a flower? This is what the narrator is looking for. To try to make it, she takes a revolutionary tool, an Artificial Intelligence. Through the film, she creates a link with Mary Delany. Indeed, the flowers created 300 years ago by the English botanist are strangely in resonance with those created by the algorithms. Between technology and emotions, Algorithms of Beauty questions the limits of our gaze when faced with AI images.</p> <p dir="ltr">&nbsp;</p> <p dir="ltr"><strong>&nbsp;</strong></p>

Animal Model

Maud Faivre Marceau Boré

<p>In a center for animal behavior research, humans conduct astonishing experiments with insects. As witnesses to these experiments, our perception of these familiar animals is gradually transformed.</p>

As far as the world reaches

Daniel Frota de Abreu

<p>A birdwatcher tries to record the scarce birdsongs in a deactivated mining area, while a team of ethnobotanists faces the challenges of storing one of the largest natural history collections in the world. Scientific practices from the past and present meet in the investigation of a 17th century catalogue of Brazilian plants and animals published in Amsterdam as a product of the Dutch expedition of artists and scientists in the country.</p> <p>Borrowing its title from the motto of Prince Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, governor of the Dutch colony in Brazil, the film reinterprets relations between colonial expansion and ecological exhaustion through the archives of Brazilian natural history spread throughout the centuries in European collections. The recording of a long forgotten voice by the birdwatcher triggers an exploration about the everlasting effects of colonialism in the way nature is perceived and represented today.</p>

Coral

Sonia Oleniak

<p>With lyrics translated from an imaginary language, Sonia Oleniak&rsquo;s filmic song cycle follows a cohort of sleepless solitaries through the night of a lunar eclipse. Strange singing and luminous images make mythopoesis of their labors and losses. In a boardwalk caf&eacute;, they convene for respite from their surreal nocturnal rituals, shot through with birds, salt, and violin rosin.</p>

Crazy Lotus

Naween Noppakun

<p>Strange things seem to be happening to the citizens chasing Good Seconds along the riverbank, as they are wandering around between infinite possibilities. The newly released Distant Heart Glasses they wear offer them an escape from reality which is as tempting as it is daunting. In a world where the lines between our urban spaces and our digital environment are continuously blurring, what is the best possible path forward, if there still is one?</p>

Decoding Ancestral Knowledge

Ruth Lichtman Sharon Shattuck

<p>Hawaiian microbiologist Kiana Frank takes us to a sacred fish pond and explains how traditional knowledge and microbiology can work together to help us understand how to care for and manage the land.</p>

Direction Of The Road

Janelle VanderKelen

<p>As a tree muses on their role in the Order of Things, this being (which humans normally think of as immobile) reveals the speed, agility, and finesse integral to their experience of the world. Adapted from a short story written by Ursula LeGuin, this decidedly inhuman filmic narrative uses the overlapping cyan and scarlet of anaglyph stereoscopic 3D imaging to speculate how a tree (which responds more acutely to light waves in the red and blue portions of the spectrum) might perceive the world visually. Though 3D stereoscopy is used in this film, it is intended to be viewed without 3D glasses.</p>

EarthWorm

Phillip Barker

<p>Sean&rsquo;s mission on Earth is to help humans survive extinction. However, confronted with &lsquo;Earth&rsquo;s pointless gravity&rsquo;, Sean&rsquo;s body weakens. He seeks the help of a domesticated horse, who introduces him to poetry. He continues to collect samples: animals, worms, and the very children who have befriended him.</p>

Estrelladistante (Distant Star)

Celeste Rojas Mugica

<p>A weapon beams a dazzling light towards earth. The night is extinguishing, the earth is burning, the creatures flee towards the bottom of the world.</p>

For Here Am I Sitting in a Tin Can Far Above the World

Gala Hernández López

<p>A woman dreams of a future economic crisis affecting the cryptocurrency market. Thousands have been cryogenized, awaiting better times. Are they suspended, or are they falling into the void?</p>

Gavia stellata (Sea Mew Set with Stars)

Erin Espelie

<p>Replication in &quot;contemporary society is characterized by the loss of data, degradation, and noise.&quot; (Lev Manovich) Reproducing original watercolors for The Birds of America&mdash;which were augmented with friable pastel, chalk, and crayon&mdash;caused the naturalist John James Audubon (born Jean Rabin) much consternation; for the red-throated loon (plate 202), he relied upon engraver Robert Havell, who charged &pound;114 for one ream (500 sheets) of paper, copper plates, tin shipping cases, and the work of etching, printing, and aquatinting.</p>

I walk while glaciers melt

Lucia Lambarri Barberis

<p>This visual essay blends animation and live-action footage to take the audience on a journey through the Andean mountains and snowy peaks of Cusco, Peru. The film traverses the director&rsquo;s reflections on walking as a metaphor for embracing life&rsquo;s fragility and transformation. By revisiting Andean relational animism, rituals, and pilgrimage, the film interrogates modernity and our place in an era of melting glaciers, while celebrating the shared journey with others.</p>

Interfacing (2024)

Daksha Patel

<p>&#39;Interfacing&#39; 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 modelling and microscopy footage, to create slippages in meanings between the voices and visuals.</p>

In Dreams (2023)

Josh Shaffner

<p>A surrealist sci-fi animation about a burn victim in an imagined future of healthcare.</p>

Elogio a la Oscuridad (In Praise of Darkness)

Adrián Balseca

<p>Through the production of an obsidian prosthetic eye, body and territory are mirrored as traces of an inverse time, which uncover syndromes of our present.</p>

In the Ice, everything leaves a trace

Christoph Oeschger Gianna Molinari

<p>As Arctic ice melts, borders shift once inaccessible places and resources become accessible, and new claims to raw materials and territories are made. The Arctic is changing like never before, from a romanticized image of wild, harsh nature to a technological place full of economic interests. The Arctic has become a hotspot of border shifts and geopolitical interests. The essay film &quot;In the Ice, everything leaves a trace&quot; is a poetic approach to this place and makes the invisible visible.</p> <p>&quot;In the Ice, everything leaves a trace&quot; Is the first outcome of joint research of the Author Gianna Molinari and the Artist Christoph Oeschger. We started in Greenland; there, we recognized that the Arctic is also elsewhere: In the tubes, under microscopes, electronics and maps.<br /> What is in our heads as a romantic image of wilderness becomes a playground for geopolitical and economic interests.</p>

Jizai

Maiko Endo

<p>Working with a robot integrated with him, a boy tries to make a new body part to expand the limits of human abilities. The boy is communicating to two other kids simultaneously via the specially made glasses. Their visions reflect the real world and also the cyber world. Everything seems like connected each other, but&hellip;</p>

Just Above the Surface of the Earth (For a Coming Extinction)

Marianna Milhorat

<p>A poetic portrait of contemporary wildlife conservation, JUST ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH reflects on empathy, agency, and the role of hope in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. This debut nonfiction feature examines scientists and citizen scientists who conduct surveys of frogs, which serve as an indicator species; study sea stars threatened by disease; track bats whose populations have been decimated by white-nose syndrome; and collect data on insects declining at unprecedented rates. Set primarily at night, the film weaves together observational and lyrical sequences, texts written by authors including W.S. Merwin and Adam Nicolson, and an otherworldly soundscape. JUST ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH is a visceral, sensory meditation on what it means to live in a broken world.</p>

Kawauso

Akihito Izuhara

<p>A girl is strolling through the fields when a Japanese river otter catches up with her. The two try in vain to communicate while all the junk of humanity rains down around them.</p>

Know Your Stones

Katarina Jazbec

<p>The stones beneath our feet will bear testimony to our future in silence.</p>

Les animaux vont mieux (Lick a Wound)

Nathan Ghali

<p>A mysterious community of animals has chosen to live self-sufficiently in the basement of a church. Sheltered from humans, they engage in various rituals.</p>

Monisme

Riar Rizaldi

<p>Several professional actors and non-actor professionals portray a dynamic of human-nature relationship in one of the most active stratovolcano in the world, Mount Merapi. In the shadows of recent eruptions, these actors play a story that is written together with volcanologist, sand miner, and a mystic&mdash;people who have a close bond with the mountain, potentially illustrating fiction and nonfiction situations that could and would have happened in Merapi. Formed in between factual and fictional, future and past, material and incorporeal, scientific and magic, Monisme trips to the place where actuality is intertwined with myth and legend.</p>

My Want of You Partakes of Me

Sasha Litvintseva Beny Wagner

<p>An imaginative film about the digestive process as a condition for our physical existence - and as a prism for an intellectual journey through the cultural history of the body.</p>

Oxygen (2023)

Karel Doing

<p>Blades of grass race across the screen.</p>

Salute to the Sun

Darko Masnec

<p>An astronaut in love orbits around the sun absorbing its energy. But the sun is too big, causing their connection to break, and the astronaut must continue on his own. As he tries to return to his source of energy, he realizes there are others like him. What started out as a game, slowly turns into a love triangle. Shapes change, but their needs remain the same.</p>

Schlafsand

Elias Bötticher

<p>Schlafsand (the sand that makes us sleep) is here our refutation of the existential threat linked to human induced climate change. Shot in Switzerland, a land famous for its breathtaking mountain landscapes and its comfortable living standards, the film investigates the visual evidence of this denial. From a coal mine to a dying glacier, the film uses pictorial beauty to address the political and social blindness surrounding climate change.</p>

Surface Séance

Michael Heindl

<p><strong>Surface S&eacute;ance</strong>&nbsp;puts perception to the test courtesy of the inertia of the eye, aka persistence of vision. Split seconds of the outside world occasionally pierce the darkness, glimpses of the night seen through subway windows and tram doors flash onto neon-lit zones, everyday signage, logos and public transport pictograms. Public space splinters into colorful fragments.&nbsp;<em>Blink and you&#39;ll miss it.</em><br /> <br /> A trip on Vienna&#39;s public transport system provides the framework for a special exploratory expedition by virtue of the conceptual delight with which Michael Heindl approaches everyday trivialities. His protagonist is an amorphous creature who takes center screen: Its dirty white form emerges from the brittle darkness, gradually pushing itself to the front. Reminiscent of an embryo and ceaselessly changing, it pulsates like a single-cell organism under the microscope, growing into a grey madcap: These are traces of bodies, smudges found on panes of glass and other surfaces, they appear roughly smeared or delicately dotted, ranging from amorphous streaks to fingerprints and handprints, kissing lips, smiley faces, numbers, letters and symbols. The synthetic starry night of dust particles surrounding the images endows them with a vaguely cosmic (and&nbsp;<em>comic</em>) quality.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> Flora Rajakowitsch&#39;s sound design emphasizes the lighthearted aspects of this borderline abstract undertaking. It plays with the sounds of fingers squeaking across windows and screens, it alienates and awakens the dirty schemata of the stimulating montage sequences to cartoonish life. In the end Heindl brings his gray, single-frame painting to full bloom - and realizes the possibility of a loop &shy;&ndash; an endless loop: The 360-degree pan of an empty subway interior becomes the echo of a story about sweat, water and fat, concluding with the prospect of a new start.&nbsp;(<em>Stefan Grissemann</em>)</p>

Tale of the Mammoth Goddess

Wendi Yan

<p>A resurrected mammoth tells her story of escaping from the Pleistocene Park to hide in an abandoned coal mine, where she expects her natural death.</p>

Terrae Sidera

Giulia Grossmann

<p>An intergalactic consortium has sent a volunteer scientist into the past to understand the planktonic ecosystem that existed on the planet before the exodus. He explores the ancient Earth, collects water samples and discovers similarities between the microscopic world and the infinite universe.</p>

The Cinema Within

Chad Freidrichs

<p>Why does the uniquely cinematic language of film editing work? In real life we don&rsquo;t instantly jump from one viewpoint to another. Such a bizarre disruption would be nauseatingly jarring. And yet, film viewers effortlessly understand, and don&rsquo;t even notice, most edits. This has led to the suspicion that film editing exploits some universal features of human perception &ndash; that a well-edited film is an illusion that mirrors our window upon the world.</p> <p>Film editor Walter Murch, scholar David Bordwell and a handful of eminent psychologists present this compelling portrait of the profound &ldquo;naturalness&rdquo; of film editing. But in the remote mountains of Turkey, a budding researcher &ndash; alongside a group of people who have never seen films &ndash; puts this deepest of cinematic ideas to the test.</p>

The Diary of a Sky

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

<p>The COVID pandemic brought air traffic in Lebanon to a standstill. Despite this, the noise caused by planes over Beirut increased dramatically. At the peak of the lockdown Israeli fighter jets and drones overflew the city up to 50 times a day. Their altitude would suggest that they were not there for surveillance or reconnaissance purposes, but with the aim of producing noise. However, the city&rsquo;s countless diesel generators, reconstruction work following the explosion and the numerous civil protests relegated these noises to a hum in the background whose threatening origins could almost be forgotten. The artist and Turner Prize-winner Lawrence Abu Hamdan calls himself a &ldquo;private ear&rdquo;, an independent audio investigator. In the course of the last year, he has collected over 800 recordings of Israeli aircraft which he places at the centre of his new audio-visual essay that explores the link between territoriality and atmospheric violence.</p>

The Hollow

Jean-Jacques Martinod Bretta C. Walker

<p>A hermit lives in solitude within the dense, misty forests of Southern Appalachia and the infernal fires of a glass foundry. Here the phenomenological lines between real and imaginal realms blur as a cosmic flame continues to swell.</p>

The Lost Season

Kelly Sears

<p>Earth is experiencing its final winter. A streaming company hires all available camera operators to film the final weeks of this soon-to-be-lost season. After seeing their footage as a form of ecological exploitation, the camera operators refuse to commodify further climate collapse with their labor.</p>

The New Ruins

Manuel Embalse

<p>An amateur archaeologist obsessed with electronic waste records images and sounds for ten years, as part of an intuitive investigation. As he shapes a personal, playful and musical diary, he travels the world tirelessly, trying to decipher what his findings hide and how he might interpret them.</p>

The Rainbow Bridge

Dimitri Simakis

<p>Tina and her elderly dog MeeMoo discover a clinic promising human-to-pet communication. However, two sinister doctors uncover a bond between them so strong, it transcends time and space. They might be the key to something greater, but at what cost?</p>

The Waiting (2023)

Voker Schlecht

<p>Karen Lips is researcher and lives for several years in a tiny little shack in Costa Rica to observe frogs. When she leaves the cloud forest for a short time and returns, the frogs are gone. All of them. Karen sets out to find them &ndash; and encounters a horrible truth.</p>

Suya Dokun (Touch The Water)

Yusuf Demirörs

<p>A lost and amnesiac narrator explores the toxic and alien waterways of New York City in order to discover his relationship to this environment and what it means to be human.</p>

Toti (2024)

Maëlle Chevallier

<p>Two small cells meet and grow up in harmony, until a forced separation turns them into beings so different<br /> that they cannot continue on their journey together.</p>

Whale Fall (2023)

Patrick Hough

<p>In the middle of an Irish peat bog, the inexplicable remains of a humpback whale are discovered by two rural women. Drawn into the mystery of how and why it has appeared, they soon realise the whale is exerting its own magnetic force; summoning the ghosts of lifeforms and ecosystems obliterated in the name of &#39;progress&#39;. Part ecological horror, part existentialist drama, Whale Fall is a striking meditation on the consequences of the so-called Anthropocene - our current era of human-induced planetary change.</p>

Preemptive Listening

Aura Satz

<p>In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, &lsquo;Preemptive Listening&rsquo; is an ode to the sirens that are and those that could be. Siren compositions from over 20 contemporary musicians form a resonant voice to ask; Does an alarm have to be alarming?</p>

Preparations for a Miracle

Tobias Nölle

<p>A time-travelling Android from the future seeks the Last King to record his beautiful voice which will deliver existential answers to the machines of the future. It&rsquo;s the year 2022 and the King is about to sing. Preparations for a Miracle is a sci-fi documentary about our exploitation of nature and machines, seen through the eyes of a time-travelling Android, who interprets everything wrong. Or so it seems.</p>

Next Her Heart

Anna Kipervaser

<p>Eternal recurrence and wisdom undone. The end or the beginning. Who are we that we. One and the same are the shadow cast and its cause.</p> <p>A hypnotic journey through the seven valleys on the way to reach the abode of the Simurgh.</p>

Testerep

Vincent Langouche

<p>A team of scientists explore the vanished island of Testerep off the Belgian coast. Traditional excavations are combined with advanced technologies, like computer simulations and sound wave analyses, to trace the coastal evolution over 5,000 years.<br /> As researchers decode the mysteries, they contemplate the symbiotic relationship between humans, technology, and our temporal landscape, offering glimpses into future virtual worlds and bridging the gaps between the past, present, and the ever-evolving role of technology in shaping our understanding of the world.</p>

Two Suns

SUPERFLEX

<p>Between 1946 and 1958, the US tested 67 nuclear bombs on the Marshall Islands. Spectators of the blasts said: &ldquo;It was as if there were two suns in the sky.&rdquo;</p>