Science New Wave Festival XV

The Invisible Extinction

Steven Lawrence Sarah Schenck

<p>Superstar scientists Gloria Dominguez-Bello and Marty Blaser confront an international public health emergency - the loss of our ancestral microbes &ndash; while three patients with life-threatening diseases triggered by this disruption explore experimental treatments to save their lives.</p> <p>Most people think germs (another word for microbes) are bad for us, but what if they&rsquo;re mostly good and wiping out the ones inside us is creating a health crisis that threatens humanity&rsquo;s future?</p> <p>That&rsquo;s the driving question behind &quot;The Invisible Extinction,&quot; a documentary film that follows globetrotting microbiologists Gloria Dominguez-Bello and Marty Blaser on their urgent quest to protect and restore our microbes before it&rsquo;s too late. Microbes are critical to our development and well-being. The microbiome is all the microbes (bacteria! and fungi! and viruses!) in our bodies that usually keep us healthy. In the last 50 years, we humans have lost 50% of our ancestral microbes with devastating consequences. Gloria and Marty believe this loss has triggered a surge in life-threatening illnesses that barely existed fifty years ago, including obesity, asthma, autism, severe food allergies, and diabetes - and that what&#39;s driving this loss is overuse of antibiotics; highly processed foods; a hyper-hygienic lifestyle sealing humans away from animals and plant life; and elective C-sections. The Invisible Extinction follows Gloria and Marty - who are partners in life and the lab - on their urgent quest to reverse this trend, as they conduct groundbreaking research and work with collaborators in Venezuela, China, Israel, Switzerland, and the USA.</p>

Neptune Frost

Saul Williams Anisia Uzeyman

<p>Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that&rsquo;s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region&#39;s natural resources &ndash; and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being &ndash; past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience &ndash; Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.</p>

Fire of Love

Sara Dosa

<p>Katia and Maurice Krafft loved two things &mdash; each other and volcanoes. For two decades, the daring French volcanologist couple roamed the planet, chasing eruptions, documenting their discoveries. Ultimately, they lost their lives in a 1991 volcanic explosion, leaving a legacy that forever enriched our knowledge of the natural world. Director Sara Dosa and the filmmaking team fashion a lyrical celebration of the intrepid scientists&rsquo; spirit of adventure, drawing from the Kraffts&rsquo; spectacular archive. Fire of Love tells a story of primordial creation &amp; destruction, following two bold explorers as they venture into the unknown, all for the sake of love.</p>

The Sacred Spirit

Chema García Ibarra

<p>Julio is dead. It&#39;s terrible news for OVNI Levante, the association of ufology aficionados that he ran. The death hits one its members, Jos&eacute; Manuel, particularly hard. Julio and he had a secret project to change human destiny. Now he must carry on alone..</p> <p>Jos&eacute; Manuel and the other members of the ufology association Ovni-Levante meet weekly to exchange information about extraterrestrial messages and abductions. Julio, their leader, dies unexpectedly, leaving Jos&eacute; Manuel as the only person who knows about the cosmic secret that could alter the human future. Meanwhile in Spain a search is going on for a little girl who disappeared some weeks before.</p>

Tigre Gente

Elizabeth Unger

<p>A Bolivian park ranger and a young Hong Kongese journalist risk their lives to go undercover and investigate a new, deadly jaguar trade that&rsquo;s sweeping South America. Along the way, they grapple with questions of empathy, responsibility, and bridging a cultural gap to prevent the jaguar trade from spiraling out of control. Shuttling between the breathtaking biodiversity of Madidi National Park in Bolivia and the tense China-Myanmar border, TIGRE GENTE juxtaposes the tranquility and splendor of the jungle against the small-minded, sadistic nature of Man, its Destroyer.</p>

Karmalink

Jake Wachtel

<p>Conceived as a way to interrogate processes of neo-colonialism, and highlighting the alienating effects of technological progress, Jake Wachtel&#39;s KARMALINK is a mind-bending tale of reincarnation, artificial consciousness, and the search for enlightenment.&nbsp;</p> <p>In near-future Phnom Penh, the rich and privileged are augmented with nanotech, and new skyscrapers crowd the skyline. In Tralok Bek, a tight-knit community threatened with forced eviction, 13-year-old Leng Heng is having vivid dreams of his past lives. He and his friends are convinced they are meant to find a buried Buddhist statue to save their homes, and they seek out help from a street-smart girl in the neighborhood, Srey Leak. Together they follow clues across town and into the past, uncovering a link with a genius neuroscientist on a quest for digital nirvana. As Leng Heng&rsquo;s dreams converge on the present, his very sense of identity begins to unravel. When it becomes clear that the stakes are higher than they imagined, the two friends must decide how far they are willing to go to find their treasure and the truth.</p>

Sideral (2021)

Carlos Segundo

<p>In Natal, the Northeast of Brazil, the country is preparing to launch its first manned spaceship into space.<br /> A couple lives with their two children near the space center, the husband is a mechanic while the wife is a cleaning lady, who dreams of other horizons.</p>

Como Miramos (As We See)

Xavier Nueno

<p>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 Ram&oacute;n y Cajal at the Museum of the Nobel Foundation in Sweden. The scientists interviewed are: Javier de Felipe, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Casiana Mu&ntilde;oz, and Mar&iacute;a Blasco.</p>

Lolos (Boobs)

Marie Valade

<p>As playful in its form and technique as it is thoughtful in its take on womanhood, this animated wonder by Quebec&rsquo;s Marie Valade uses a woman&rsquo;s surrealist journey to explore her love&ndash;hate relationship with her breasts, body, and femininity.</p>

Helena from Sarayaku

Eriberto Benedicto Gualinga

<p>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 leaders who ask her to deliver a message to the world &mdash; Kawsak Sacha, or &lsquo;Living Forest,&rsquo; an innovative concept in conservation, in which the jungle is considered to be a living being. After COVID-19 confines Helena in Puyo &mdash; the closest city to Sarayaku &mdash; she learns that 80% of her community has been infected with the virus, and that the Bobonaza River has flooded part of her village. She is Helena of Sarayaku, and this is her story.</p>

Light of the Night

Matej Pok

<p>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, yet.</p>

The Two Faces of Tomorrow

Patrick Hough

<p>Algae have helped shape life on Earth in ways we can barely imagine. But in his visually exquisite science fiction documentary &lsquo;The Two Faces of Tomorrow&rsquo;, film artist Patrick Hough gives us a speculative insight into this peculiar life form. Through the observations of an unseen scientist, we move from a Roman bathhouse to a high-tech laboratory where a team of scientists in space suits are developing bio-fuels and artificial food. The relationship between human and non-human life forms is a rich field that Hough&rsquo;s philosophically dizzying essay uncovers in thought-provoking threads that stitch together the relationships between algae and capitalism, the Earth and ourselves in new constellations</p>

A Language of Shapes

Samantha Moore

<p>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 decodes and celebrates the research happening in The Mostowy Lab at the London School of Hygiene &amp; Tropical Medicine. In an accessible and engaging way it aims to convey cutting edge research about how our cells defeat invading pathogens, and how these scientific discoveries can improve wellbeing and save lives around the world.</p>

Into the Ice

Lars Ostenfeld

<p>INTO THE ICE is a journey of discovery to the vast masses of ice and the secret of our future that the ice harbouring. Director Lars Ostenfeld accompanies three of the world&rsquo;s leading glaciologists on pioneering scientific expeditions to and INTO the Greenland ice sheet. Cool and hardworking Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, sensitive and politically engaged Jason Box, and daring and fearless Alun Hubbard are all working to collect new crucial data that can help us answer some key questions of our time: How fast is the ice melting? How quickly are sea levels rising? How much time do we have left to change the course of the Earth? As the scientists are caught in the dilemma of collecting new evidence to an inconvenient truth while people in power are not prepared to take action to prevent the earth from dying, the film brings us breathtaking images from a place that soon will be lost as we know it now. A documentary tale about science, nature and adventure.</p>

Haulout (2022)

Evgenia Arbugaeva Maxim Arbugaev

<p>On a remote coast of the Russian Arctic in a wind-battered hut, a lonely man waits to witness an ancient gathering. But warming seas and rising temperatures bring an unexpected change, and he soon finds himself overwhelmed.</p>

Nuisance Bear

Jack Weisman Gabriela Osio Vanden

<p>Churchill, Manitoba, is famous as an international destination for photographing polar bears. We&rsquo;ve seen the majestic images and classic wildlife series captured here - but what do these bears see of us? Through a shift in perspective &#39;Nuisance Bear&#39; reveals an obstacle course of tourist paparazzi and wildlife officers whom bears must navigate during their annual migration.</p>

Aribada

Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau Natalia Escobar

<p>In the middle of the Colombian coffee region, Aribada, the resurrected monster, meets Las Traviesas, a group of indigenous trans women from the Embera tribes. The magical, the dreamlike and the performative coexist in their unique world - an aesthetic and spiritual universe in which documentary and fiction merge into a transcultural narrative. Enchanted by the beauty and power of their jais (spirits), Aribada decides to join Las Traviesas in creating their own trans*futurist community.</p>

There's a Bison on The Prairie

Morgan Miller

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

Geographies of Solitude

Jacquelyn Mills

<p>Two women on a lonely island off the coast of Nova Scotia: Sable Island. Conservationist Zoe Lucas was an art student when she came there for the first time in the 1970s and has been living on this remote strip of land for decades now, mostly alone. Director Jacquelyn Mills films Lucas on her daily trips around the island to observe the local flora and fauna. Her studies of Sable Island&rsquo;s population of wild horses, for which the island is famous, and of the biodiversity there in general have made the self-taught scientist an esteemed expert. Collecting the alarming amounts of plastic washing up also forms part of Lucas&rsquo;s everyday life. Mills films on 16 mm, which lends a special beauty to the barren landscape. Science and art fuse in the two women&rsquo;s activities, each enriching the other. The movements of beetles are made into music. Horse manure provides useful data for Lucas and is just as useful for Mills&rsquo;s experiments in film exposure and developing, along with algae and other vegetation. When Mills loads the final film reel into her camera, it is not just the shoot that is coming to an end, but also a special encounter between two people. A twinge of melancholy is unavoidable.</p>

Burial

Emilija Skarnulyte

<p>A python slithers and curls over the abandoned control room of Chernobyl&rsquo;s sister, the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, its radioactive core an unleashed monster that will slither through time for a million years. From Etruscan ruins and sunken cities to the most modern of underground repositories, director Emilija &Scaron;karnulytė follows our attempts to bury the immortal. Addressing the epochal effects of nuclear technology on all levels, Burial follows the cycle of power, an eternal return, another serpent eating its tail.</p>

A Letter from Yene

Manthia Diawara

<p><em>A Letter from Yene</em>&nbsp;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 urbanisation. Fish have become scarce and the pirogues, traditional fishing boats, cannot go far enough into the sea, so their owners have turned to new occupations. Modern fishing requires motorised boats and large nets made from non-biodegradable wires that become lethally entangled with purple coral, and human detritus, eventually washing up on shores like woven creatures of the sea. The women who used to smoke fish and preserve it as part of a sustainable mode of living now sell pebbles to the owners of the newly built houses. The sand, granite, shells and pebbles that affluent house owners buy to build, decorate and protect their homes against the winds and salt of the sea contribute, ironically, to the degradation of the bottom layers of the ocean and intensify coastal erosion.<br /> <br /> Diawara&rsquo;s documentary unfolds as if it were a letter written to the viewer. In&nbsp;<em>A Letter from Yene</em>, the filmmaker is not only the storyteller, but also the owner of one of the houses along the beach. Following encounters between fishermen, pebble collectors and himself, Diawara explores how their intersecting lives collectively and unknowingly contribute to the undermining of their shared environment.</p>

Sayidat Al Bahr (Scales)

Shahad Ameen

<p>Set in a dystopian landscape, SCALES is the story of a young strong-willed girl, Hayat, who livesin a poor fishing village governed by a dark tradition in which every family must give onedaughter to the sea creatures who inhabit the waters nearby. In turn the sea creatures arehunted by the men of the village.</p> <p>Saved from this fate by her father, Hayat is considered a curse on the village and grows up anoutcast. Nevertheless, she does not surrender to this fate and fights for a place within hervillage. After her mother gives birth to a baby boy, Hayat must accept the brutal custom ofgiving herself to the sea creatures or finding a way to escape.</p>

Terrain Vague

Edward Kihn

<p><em>Terrain Vague </em>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 class Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood--an industrial hub that shuttered in the wake of the crisis of 2008.</p> <p>In her investigations into the history of the site and its environs, her peregrinations around the city (including a stop at the fateful 2016 Democratic National Convention), and her interactions with a beleaguered real estate agent, the researcher reflects on the cycles of creative destruction that permanently transform the urban landscape, providing openings for new schemes and entrepreneurial science fictions of development.</p>

Teorema de Tiempo (Time Theorem)

Andrés Kaiser

<p>Years after the death of my grandmother Anita, I inspected the old building where she and my grandfather Arnoldo worked all their lives as printers. Among offset machines, accounting notebooks and paper envelopes smelling of mothballs, I found thousands of photographs and hundreds of home movies. The images not only revealed their secret profession as amateur filmmakers, but also related a line of painful family tragedies that marked the destiny of their existence.</p>

Zoo Lock Down

Andreas Horvath

<p>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 attract the audience. Unlike actors the animals don&rsquo;t play roles. They are just being themselves and their home transforms into a stage every day. When the paying visitors fail to appear because the spectacle is canceled, a unique opportunity unfolds for an intimate and at times surreal look at the zoo&rsquo;s inhabitants.</p>

Derek Changes His Mind

Derek Dabkoski Ian McClellan Im Joong Kim

<p>Derek Dabkoski enrolls in a year long, &nbsp;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,&nbsp;is that his commitment to improving his quality of life, shows him he has the strength to help his wife Nadia attain her US residency and raise their newborn daughter Carmen.&nbsp;</p>

Utama

Alejandro Loayza Grisi

<p>In the Bolivian highlands, an elderly Quechua couple has been living the same daily routine for years. When an uncommonly long drought threatens their entire way of life, Virginio and Sisa face the dilemma of resisting or being defeated by the passage of time.</p> <p>With the arrival of their grandson Clever, the three of them will face, each in their own way, the environment, the necessity for change, and the meaning of life itself.</p>

Un fleuve l'hiver (A River in Winter)

Félix Lamarche

<p>The director F&eacute;lix Lamarche questions our relationship with the St. Lawrence River during the winter. Aboard the Amundsen, a Canadian coast guard icebreaker, we follow passionate scientists who explore the mysteries of an inaccessible nature. Combining the landscapes of the ice floe and the invisible movements of underwater life, the film takes us on a documentary journey to the heart of this still little known river.</p>

AFREET: Honeycomb Boom

Omar Al-Nakib

<p dir="ltr">A demon enters the frequencies of a song as it&#39;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&mdash;where she collapses from exhaustion.&nbsp;</p> <p dir="ltr">She makes her way back home, cools off, and grabs a glass of water. As she sips, she comes to a sudden realization, and spits it out. She takes out her boom mic, and inspects the glass. A faint, odd sound appears to be coming from the water.</p> <p dir="ltr">She is interrupted by her housemate. As the housemate complains about a blocked nose, the musician ever so slowly aims her mic at him. A strained, demonic sound can be heard. She then slowly lowers the mic, and turns the sound knob on her external recorder to zero.</p> <p><br /> &nbsp;</p>

Mauvaise graine (Bad Seed)

Nadège Herrygers

<p>On an estate, Sadia engages in a mysterious traffic. Arthur, a friend of hers, finds out what she is hiding. He will have to make a choice...</p>

Bergtatt (Busy)

Jan Otto Ertesvåg

<p>The reality of beach snails is not that much different from human lives, filled with an intricate interplay of social interaction and solitude, curiosity about the world and its rigid rules, fleetingness of life and the resilience to go on.</p>

Biopixels

Kristina Dutton

<p>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 major molecular paintbrushes are found in numerous other creatures as well.&nbsp;</p> <p>Shot at two cutting-edge research labs which specialize in the evolution of butterflies and moths, BIopixels is an animated short film exploring the world of evolutionary biology on the microscopic scale.&nbsp;</p> <p>The images - rendered from collections containing over 50,000 specimens - were take by microscopists over three years to create the animated shorts Nanoscapes and Biopixels. Both the animation and the score play with concepts of pattern, time, density and other means of development common to biological evolution.</p>

Black Mayonnaise

Nathan Kensinger

<p>A dark voyage into one of the most contaminated bodies of water in the United States. In New York City, a Superfund cleanup is now underway, unearthing the toxic sediment of &lsquo;black mayonnaise&#39; at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal.</p>

Chaytu (Fantasma)

Pável Quevedo Ullauri

<p>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.</p>

Cinegraffic Score

iloobia AKA Tim Grabham

<p>Celluloid film is reconfigured into a graphic musical score, with obscure narratives emerging as the film is reanimated.</p> <p>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 material back to life in its new incarnation.</p> <p>&#39;Cinegraffic Score&#39; continues an ongoing interest in reconfiguring abandoned, decaying and orphaned celluloid material into complex collages with ambiguous fragmentary narratives.&nbsp;</p> <p>This project also expands on previous experiments in designing graphic scores - where the representation of music is achieved through the use of visual symbols as oppose to traditional music notation.</p>

Coming Out with the Help of a Time Machine

Naman Gupta

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

Déversement (Release)

Baptiste Grison

<p>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.</p>

Dreamer of a Final Theory

Molly Murphy

<p>An Animated Conversation with the late, great theoretical physicist &amp; Nobel Laureate, Steven Weinberg. Excerpts from interviews recorded between 2020 &amp; 2021.</p>

Elena

Biruté Sodeikaité

<p>Elena is enjoying her life in clouds, until she meets a charming Red Crane and a seed starts growing inside her. Not ready for the changes and sacrifices that the seed brings to her life, Elena rips it out of her body. Soon she will realise the consequences of doing so.</p>

Tout ce qui était proche s’éloigne (Everything Near Becomes Distant)

Yunyi Zhu

<p>&ldquo;[&hellip;] &lsquo;alles Nahe werde fern,&rsquo; 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.&rdquo; Jorge Luis Borges, &ldquo;Blindnes,&rdquo; in Seven Nights, New Directions, 1984, p. 1215. In 2006 my friend Xiaoxin caught an eye disease and, from that moment on, began losing his sight. By 2015 he had become completely blind. He told me that this complete darkness frightened him. I felt that my fried was en route somewhere. In the &ldquo;land of the blind&rdquo; Xiaoxin will live in a solitary world (a world without simulacra), a real world (we must touch), a poetic world (the collapsed statue)</p>

Global Fruit

G. Anthony Svatek

<p>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.</p>

IEVA

Vytautas Plukas Domas Petronis

<p>Man tries to recreate himself by how he views himself, but this broken reflection only gets lost in the uncanny valley.</p>

Ampangabagat Nin Talakba Ha Likol (It's Raining Frogs Outside)

Maria Estela Paiso

<p>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.</p>

Moonrise

Rowena Potts

<p><em>If the Moon could speak, what would it say?</em></p> <p>A commercially-driven, international Space Race has propelled us to this moment in the 21st century: within a few years, the Moon&rsquo;s surface may be subject to permanent human occupation, its resources aggressively mined for profit, and its ancient nature-spaces polluted by private industry. Do we want to stand by silently as such irreparable damage is caused to our sister satellite? What if we actually listened to what the Moon had to say? Based on an original poem by award-winning Australian author <a href="https://www.ceridwendovey.com/">Ceridwen Dovey</a>, <em>Moonrise </em>is a striking, surreal montage of historical, artistic and scientific lunar imagery that invites us to consider the Moon&rsquo;s point of view in the face of increasingly exploitative human activity in space.</p>

NAYA (Der Wald hat Tausend Augen) (2021)

Sebastian Mulder

<p>She-wolf Naya, monitored on her journey from her birthplace in Germany through the Netherlands to Belgium, becomes more and more famous and visible &ndash; until it endangers not just her wildness, but her existence.&nbsp;</p>

Nanoscapes

Kristina Dutton

<p>Making the invisible, visible!&nbsp;</p> <p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">Images of butterfly wings at the microscopic scale are stunning, and at the nanoscopic scale they become otherworldly.&nbsp;</p> <p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">The colorful images in the animated short Nanoscapes were taken&nbsp;with light and electron microscopes at magnifications up to 50,000x. From iridescent blues to vivid greens, butterflies produce colors by modulating how light is reflected from their wings.&nbsp;</p> <p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">In other words, pigments are not the whole color story. Some color comes from intricate nano structures, and different organisms have evolved unique approaches to this phenomenon, called structural coloration. So a blue butterfly wing is not blue, but appears blue when tiny ridges bounce light in a way that adds together the amplitudes that make the wing appear blue.&nbsp;</p> <p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">What&rsquo;s more, the ultraviolet patterns on butterfly wings - invisible to the naked human eye - are among the most complex UV-reflecting structures in the animal kingdom.</p> <p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">The elaborate nanoscopic topography of butterfly wings has produced a wealth of data on how structural coloration works, and Nanoscapes is an artistic reimagining of exciting new research focused on how butterflies actually build these remarkable, infinitesimal landscapes.&nbsp;</p> <p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">Shot at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and the Martin Lab at George Washington University, a team of microscopists generated thousands of images over three years to create the animated shorts Nanoscapes and Biopixels. The score was created in advance of the animation, inspired by the material and conceptual layers of the project.</p>

Teacher (2022)

Xiaoting Zhong

<p>A survivor without modern education, a military robot born for war, they met in the ruins after the destruction of civilization, but became the starting point of a new civilization. Human beings created poetry in the most difficult times of survival. Poetry has no meaning for survival. But what is the meaning of survival itself? Taking the doomsday wasteland as the cloak, exploring the meaning of life and civilization, is the soul of this story.</p>

The Sprayer

Farnoosh Abeo

<p>In the land occupied with the sprayers army, no one has the right to grow any kind of plants either in public or private. So many of the people and soldiers do not even know how dose a plant grows or look like, until one day one of the soldiers finds a seed buried deep down in the dust and his curiosity is just the beginning of something extraordinary, something big, something revolutionary</p>

This Wild Abyss

Thomas Mendolia

<p>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.</p>

Mjesta koja cemo disati (Places We'll Breathe)

Davor Sanvincenti

<p>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, responsibility, struggle and freedom.</p>

Wrought

Anna Sigrithur Joel Penner

<p>A stunning visual exploration of matter in various states of microbial transformation begs fundamental questions about our complicated relationships with other species.</p> <p>Wrought begins with that universal moment of disappointment: despite all best efforts, our food has gone bad. But instead of turning away in disgust, Wrought zooms in, approaching the usually hidden world of decay with curiosity and stunning time lapse photography. Spoiling dinner leftovers bloom with successions of geometric bacterial colonies. Yeasts churn and froth in the torrential flood of juice leaking from a decaying melon. Cheese is slowly engulfed by carpets of furry, green mould. But, the film asks, would rot by any other name still reek?&nbsp;</p> <p>In answering this question, Wrought unfolds a larger story about the ways we humans construct categories for the world around us that can be limiting. It explores (and challenges) terms like spoil, ferment, compost and rot as it coaxes audiences to decompose these categories and their associated binaries: self and other, human and non-human, and nature and culture. As the film title implies, we are all forged out of the relationships that transgress such binaries; we are all, indeed, wrought.</p>

The Unveiled

Andres Rovira

<p>A lonely couple downloads a new technology that allows them to unveil the spirit realm through their smartphone, only to discover that they aren&rsquo;t as lonely as they thought.</p>

Hybrid Terrains (2021)

Elise Guillaume

<p>Set in a botanical glasshouse,&nbsp;<em>Hybrid Terrains</em>&nbsp;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 the vegetal world.</p>

Maika: The Girl From Another Galaxy

Ham Tran

<p>After losing his mother to illness and his best friend to an unexpected move, a young boy discovers a crashed spaceship and makes a new friend with awesome powers (although she does need a little help with her earthly social skills). Together, they embark on a zany, fun-filled adventure while taking on the bad guys and helping Maika find her way home.</p>

Patouille and the Parachute Seeds

Inès Bernard-Espina Mélody Boulissière Clémentine Campos

<p>Patouille is a little creature who lives in harmony with the plants. With his friend Momo, he discovers the amazing features of plants.</p>

Atrapaluz (Suncatcher)

Kim Torres

<p>When a mysterious light invades socially awkward Lila, she encounters its source: a cyborg who comes to remind her who she was in a past life.</p>

Hombres de Sal (Men of Salt)

Luis Armando Sosa Gil

<p>Cristobal returns with his family after an unsuccessful migration attempt. While fishing with his father in an industrialised area, his dreams and his body connect with the sea that gets sick day after day.</p>

Chemical Somnia

Scott Portingale

<p>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.</p>

A Perfect Storm

Karel Doing

<p>A Perfect Storm is a landscape film or, more precisely, a landscape imprinted on the film&#39;s emulsion. The artist has used seeds, tiny composite flowers and other small elements of cultivated plants that grow in his garden and wild plant species gathered from a nearby nature reserve. The film consists of sequences that are intricately composed and parts that are completely &#39;self-organised&#39;. As such plants appear not merely as inanimate objects but rather as characters who are expressive in their own right. Such otherworldliness is also reflected in a sequence of gargoyles, providing a link to the hidden animist tendencies that prevail in human culture. This primordial expressiveness is underlined by an improvised guitar solo by the inimitable Florian Magnus Maier.</p>

État du langage

Nicolas Lefebvre Camille Zisswiller

<p>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.</p>

Subserotic Bulge

Flis Holland

<p>In 2019 an iron meteorite was filed to dust, stirred into cream, and fed to 36 people. Flis&rsquo;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 short. But Flis&rsquo;s telling of it is rather different to the medical notes. The video asks about diagnosis, and how certain people&rsquo;s testimony is dismissed as unreliable. From meteorite falls to trans experiences of the medical system, it&#39;s a documentary that slips into sci-fi &ndash; and it&#39;s not always clear which part is which. Headphones recommended if screened online!</p>

La plage aux êtres (2022)

Kendra McLaughlin

<p>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.</p>

Aralkum

Mila Zhluktenko Daniel Asadi Faezi

<p>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.</p> <p>By weaving together different cinematic textures, the short film Aralkum re-imagines the dried-up Aral Sea, allowing an old fisherman to set sail one last time.</p>

The Empty Sphere (Le Cercle vide)

Stéphanie Roland

<p>Nothing really survives here. The bottom is so deep that no light ever reaches it. Very few boats go through. It is unknown when the falls will take place. This experimental documentary portrays a space object and its fall into the darkness of a space cemetery. A woman scientist reveals her attachment to this object and the absence of images documenting this mysterious place. As a reverse sci-fi journey, this essay mixes real and fictional archives to guide us, like a stalker, to the outskirts of an invisible place.</p>

Interior seis (Interior Six)

Mauricio Sánchez Arias

<p>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.</p>

Constant

Sasha Litvintseva Beny Wagner

<p>&quot;Constant&quot; is a journey through the social and political histories of measurement. For most of recorded history, the human body was the measure of all things. &ldquo;Constant&rdquo; asks what led measurement to depart from the body and become a science unto itself. The film explores three shifts in the history of measurement standardization, from the land surveying that drove Early Modern European land privatization, to the French Revolution that drove the Metric Revolution, to the conceptual dematerialisation of measurement in the contemporary era of Big Science. Each chapter traces the relationship of measurement standardization to ideas of egalitarianism, agency, justice, and power. Cinematic and technical images that begin as products of measurement systems are stretched beyond their functions to describe the resistance of lived experience to symbolic abstractions.</p>

Exhumed (Exhumados)

Rodrigo Moreno Esquivel

<p>Exposition of two different processes of forensic identification in exhumed bodies with signs of violence.</p>

Spark

Camille Hollett-French

<p>When a disillusioned woman is implicated&nbsp;in the disappearance of a lonely aging&nbsp;scientist, she must convince the police&nbsp;that hope has the power to bridge&nbsp;dimensions.</p>

Celebritas Ex Machina

Joe Nicolosi

<p>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.</p>

My Love Affair with Marriage

Signe Baumane

<p>Animator Signe Baumane turns her gaze inward for My Love Affair With Marriage, a semi-autobiographical musical exploration of love, sex, romance, and gender as viewed through the lens of neurochemistry. A Greek chorus of Latvian village women and a friendly neuron inside our protagonist&rsquo;s brain connect the film&rsquo;s multiple thematic threads, as we follow young Zelma from childhood to young adulthood and into middle age, through several marriages and across multiple continents, in search of true love.</p> <p>From Greek mythology to reproductive biology, from Moscow to Toronto, My Love Affair With Marriage takes a creative, light-hearted look at the human desire to find the person who will finally make us feel complete. Using both two-dimensional and stop-motion animation, Baumane blends earnest vulnerability and dry humor. It&rsquo;s a film that&rsquo;s both deeply personal and relatable to anyone who&rsquo;s ever lost themselves in a romantic relationship.</p>

Diteggiatura

Riccardo Giacconi

<p>The &quot;Carlo Colla &amp; Figli Puppet Company&quot; is one of the most ancient and famous puppet companies in the world. The Company&#39;s Atelier in Milan houses more than three thousand puppets. Each has a face, a body and specific characteristics, which makes it unique. &quot;Diteggiatura&quot; recounts, in a reverse chronology, a year spent in the Atelier of the Colla Company, following the rituals of a community called upon to accompany the life of anthropomorphic objects.&nbsp; The film is based on a text, performed by actress and director Silvia Costa and written by an artificial neural network.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

Imagination Blind: Aphantasia Explained

George Lee

<p>A short animation explaining the condition of Aphantasia and its subsequent impact on creativity.</p>

H6

Ye Ye

<p>The Sixth People&rsquo;s Hospital is one of the biggest in Shanghai. Its corridors are filled with medical staff, patients and families whose lives have been turned upside-down. A series of interconnecting stories paint a picture of China as it is today, where hypermodernism meets cultural tradition. Confronted with life&rsquo;s ups and downs, the sensitivity and sense of humour of the Chinese people emerges when least expected, helping them to find a sense of personal balance.</p>

The Year of the Everlasting Storm

Jafar Panâhi Malik Vitthal Anthony Chen Laura Poitras Dominga Sotomayor David Lowery Apichatpong Weerasethakul

<p>A love letter to cinema, shot across the US, Iran, Chile, China and Thailand, by seven of today&#39;s most vital filmmakers. New life in the old house. A breakaway, a reunion. Surveillance and reconciliation. An unrecognizable world, in the year of the everlasting storm.</p>

Vida Comienza, Vida Termina (Life Begins, Life Ends)

Rafael Palacio Illingworth

<p>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 suddenly cut, like jumping off a spinning carousel and finding the stillness of the ground profoundly disorienting.</p> <p>This is the exact feeling produced by VIDA COMIENZA, VIDA TERMINA. A man builds a life with a woman and tragedy strikes. What can be done? He had been writing a film, and suddenly both fiction and life start to merge. There is the fictional portrait of the Argentinian pampa, embodied by a gaucho drowning in an economy about to be destroyed, while his wife is consumed by absolute sadness. There is also the documentary portrait of a man who records his family constantly, each moment so precious, while his wife is slowly eaten up by a tumor. A film like an exorcism, an exercise in creating a mirror of one&rsquo;s experience to be able to understand and, if not to heal, at least to be able to create something in full detail, form, and sentiment, to be the one who decides when and how to destroy it for once. (Luc&iacute;a Salas)</p>

The Dam

Ali Cherri

<p>North Sudan, Merowe Dam. Abu Salma, a seasonal worker from Darfur, works in a traditional brickyard on the Nile, downstream of the dam. Just like his exiled companions, he spends his days in the mud, far from his loved ones and in exhausting labour. Each night, he secretly works on the erection of a structure, a tall shape made out of mud, wood, and plastic. As the mud builds over the solid skeleton of the structure, it begins to take on an almost organic-looking form. One day, as he returns from Jebel Barkal, the mystical mountain, his creation has mysteriously disappeared. Soon strange occurrences begin to take place, and Abu Salma starts to get the uneasy feeling that someone or something is watching him.</p>

The Human Trial

Lisa Hepner Guy Mossman

<p>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 access to a clinical trial -- only the sixth-ever embryonic stem cell trial in the world. What follows is an intimate decade-long journey with the patients and scientists who put themselves on the line to be first.</p>

Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution

Jean-Luc Godard

<p>Government agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) is dispatched on a secret mission to Alphaville, a dystopian metropolis in a distant corner of the galaxy. Caution is hot on the trail of rogue agent Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff) and a scientist named Von Braun, the creator of Alpha 60, a computer&nbsp;that uses mind control to rule over residents of Alphaville. Caution is aided in his quest to destroy the despotic computer ruler by Von Braun&#39;s own daughter, Natacha (Anna Karina).</p>

Anxious Body

Yoriko Mizushiri

<p>Living things, artificial things, geometry shapes, and lines. When these different things encounter, a new direction is born.</p>

Further and Further Away (Chhngai Dach Alai)

Polen Ly

<p>A young indigenous Bunong woman and her older brother spend one last day in their rural village in northeastern Cambodia, before an impending move to the capital city in search of a more prosperous life.</p>

Off Power

Théodora Barat

<p>Off Power starts with an urban development analysis of Hong Kong Island though the lens of its electric infrastructure. But the documentary-like tone slowly shifts to science-fiction. A mysterious phenomenon forces its electricity supply to be cut off. Therefore, Hong Kong is plunged into total darkness.</p>

Our Friendly Little Bugs (Nos Amies Les Petites Bêtes)

Marie-jo LONG

<p>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.</p>

Of Medicine and Miracles

Ross Kauffman

<p dir="ltr">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&rsquo;s experience bouncing from hospital to hospital, trying to stay hopeful amidst hopelessness, and their fateful correspondence with a doctor whose research could hold the key to her survival. But time is of the essence.&nbsp;</p> <p dir="ltr">A stunning feat of non-fiction filmmaking, Of Medicine and Miracles applies an acutely personal perspective to a highly publicized case, allowing Emily&rsquo;s parents to speak candidly about the American healthcare system, experimental cancer treatments, and their overwhelming love for their daughter. Academy Award winner Ross Kauffman&rsquo;s new documentary is a tear-jerking, heart-racing record of medical history that honors its subjects and their trauma while empowering future generations to attempt the impossible.</p>

Shadow of the Butterflies (L’Ombre des papillons)

Sofia El Khyari

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

Dream of a Shadow (2023)

Peter Galison

<p>My world was jolted by two shadow images: one, thrilling, the other terrifying.&nbsp; After a years-long effort&mdash;with 200 other scientists&mdash;we made the first image of a black hole, its shadow of no return.&nbsp; Then I fell into debilitating pain. A deadly shadow blot appeared on an MRI of my spine.&nbsp; Faced with emergency surgery and no assurance of success, I sought comfort in memory images from the past and, from collaborative work that engrossed me: images of the whole visible universe could be stored in light circling a black hole. &nbsp;It was a universal memory. An experimental back and forth between the innermost-personal and the astronomical, where shadows and consolation cross.</p>

Pragma

Ellie Heydon

<p>&quot;Here we teach you to stand in love, rather than fall in it&quot;&nbsp;</p> <p>PRAGMA is an off-beat romantic comedy, set in a Post Graduate Partnering Programme, led by the world&#39;s leading practitioner in sustainable love. We follow our protagonist Willow on a series of hilariously intense compatibility assessments lead by Dr Francis (Nick Mohammed) with an onslaught of outrageous suitors. She is left caught between a rock and a hard place asking herself the ultimate question; should you trust science or trust your heart (or let&#39;s be honest...burning loins)?</p>

Of Wood

Owen Klatte

<p>Inspired by my love of trees and wood, and wanting to experiment with a new way of animating, &quot;Of Wood&quot;&nbsp; is a unique experimental stop motion film created by progressively carving images into a large round of wood, enhanced with wooden objects emerging from the wood. It examines the role of wood in daily life through the ages and comments on the impact of excessive consumerism on our lives.</p>

The Great Refractor

Andy Graydon

<p>The Great Refractor, a collaboration with Irish poet and neuroscientist Laurence O&rsquo;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 practices centered on sounding, listening and collective resonation. The film models a &lsquo;refractive&rsquo; method of narration and authorship, one that seeks out possible transformations and decolonizations of our processes of interpreting and sharing the world.</p> <p>The film presents a series of solitary figures engaged in their work, including an astrophysicist, an artist, a translator and a weather station engineer. Participants were asked to mimic with their voices the sounds of sonified observations, from underwater hydrophone recordings to black hole gravitation waves. All the sound in the video was made from these vocal recordings. Through a chorus of voices, stories and practices, the project prods at the sensitive and uncertain interface between outer and inner worlds, exploring regions of doubt where an often inscrutable reality meets the echo chambers of human knowledge.</p>

Forêts (Forests)

Simon Plouffe

<p>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.</p>

Quarries

Ellie Ga

<p>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 the artist&rsquo;s brother, the struggle to regain the use of his hands after a serious injury transforms into a narrative about agency in the face of being forgotten, marginalized and deemed of no importance. An out-of-print photography book on Portuguese stone pavements leads to a series of improbable connections. A tour of a neurobiology lab leads to an examination of a Cold War re-education camp where prisoners were forced to dig up stones to create replicas of antiquity while covertly drawing on stone shards to mark and then bury a trace of their stories. In Quarries, Ga extracts stories of resistance from unlikely places and on overlooked surfaces.</p>

Virtual Voice

Suzannah Mirghani

<p>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 know many girls like Suzi, and many times we are her: vacuous virtual voices, echoing injustices.</p>

Siunissaq Det Sidste Menneske (The Last Human)

Ivalo Frank

<p>Life on Earth begins and ends with Greenland. Researcher Minik Rosing&rsquo;s landmark discovery of the first life contrasts with the melting ice masses in Ivalo Frank&rsquo;s tribute to her beautiful homeland.&nbsp;</p> <p>Our most basic understanding of the origins of life was recently turned upside down when Greenlandic scientist Minik Rosing discovered the first traces of life on Earth in a small fjord near Isua. His discovery predated all previous traces of life by over 300 million years. Life began in Greenland. But at the same time, its melting ice masses are accelerating day by day, and scientists around the world agree that it could drown our entire civilisation if it is allowed to continue. The end of life will also start from Greenland. Director Ivalo Frank&rsquo;s new film is a tribute to her vast, scenic country, caught between two extremes: the beginning and the end of life on Earth as we know it. Between the dizzying concept of deep time and the acceleration of modernity, Frank&rsquo;s film anchors itself in its own moment through the encounter with a group of children from the village of Kangaatsiaq who fall in love, form friendships and struggle with loss and longing.&nbsp;</p>

El sembrador de estrellas (The Sower of Stars)

Lois Patiño

<p>Distant lights reveal the outline of a city. Illuminated ships cross the water with sleeping people on board and the night appears to become liquid.</p> <p>The sower of stars wakes them and travels with them through the city. They talk about this and that &ndash; and say goodbye to everything.</p>

O, Collecting Eggs Despite The Times

Pim Zwier

<p>The unconventional documentary &ldquo;O&rdquo; exposes the intriguing fascination for the Egg.&nbsp;</p> <p>O&nbsp;is set in the twentieth century, when the German ornithologist Max Schönwetter devotes himself to his&nbsp;life&rsquo;s work: the scientific handbook of the egg. While he frantically collects and studies 19.206 eggs and&nbsp;corresponds with ornithologists, oologists, expedition members, museum staff, collectors, traitors and soldiers to expand his knowledge, the Second World War starts to evolve.</p> <p>O&nbsp;is an archive film of which the texts are wholly based on the historical correspondence of Max Schönwetter. While the passages from the correspondence form a polyphonic collage of voice-overs,&nbsp;the documentary portrays in staged scenes the &lsquo;kammerspiel&rsquo; of&nbsp;Schönwetter&rsquo;s small world of&nbsp;collecting eggs, in contrast with the events on the world stage, which are visualized through film archive material.</p>

Le fond de l'air (White Noise)

Simon Beaulieu

<p>A reflection on the fate of humanity in the Anthropocene epoch, White Noise is a roller-coaster of a film, a whirlwind of sounds and images. The fourth feature-length work by Simon Beaulieu, this film essay plunges viewers into a subjective sensory adventure&mdash;a direct physical encounter with the information overload of daily life. White Noise transforms the imminent collapse of our civilization in the era of climate change and eco-anxiety into a visceral aesthetic experience.</p>

Another Presence

Simon Ball

<p>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&rsquo;s a condition like no other. Told through the testimonies of those living with DLB, the film explores the surreal and lesser known effects of dementia, compelling us to question how our brains function and to what extent we can trust our senses.</p>

Diseases of trees (Las enfermedades de los árboles)

Dídac Gimeno

<p>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.</p>

Medusa (2021)

Chloé Malcotti

<p>The Italian coastal town of Rosignano is known and loved for its extremely white beaches and intensely blue sea. From far and wide, camera crews and tourists come to enjoy its beauty. But these extraordinary features are the result of decades of pollution by a plant belonging to the Solvay company, which produces soda ash, or sodium carbonate.</p> <p>This unorthodox and creative film shows how the chemical company has brought not only pollution but also much wealth to the community. In staged scenes on the beach, young residents talk about the future of their town and the ambivalent relationship with the company. A medium evokes the past using an X-ray of a former employee. These scenes are mixed with lyrical images of the stunning beaches and sea, and hypnotic shots of the work in the factory.</p>

Cell Worlds

Terence Saulnier Renaud Pourpre

<p>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, who would have thought that the infinitely small was so grandiose? The exploration of these worlds is accompanied by a poetic narration, supported by an original music specially composed for the occasion. Cell Worlds offers a synergistic alliance of images, sound and narration, which gives way to real moments of contemplation of scientific research. It is the first showcase of the most beautiful microscopy images from 26 research teams around the world.</p>

The Ball in the Center (La balle au centre)

Julien Lamy

<p>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 put in place...</p>

El jardín del futuro (The Garden of the Future)

Alexis Gambis

<p>The father of neuroscience&nbsp;Santiago Ram&oacute;n y Cajal wakes up one day with magnified vision.</p> <p>Based on the short story &quot;The Corrected Pessimist&quot; by Santiago Ramon y Cajal</p> <p>Voice over : Carlos Bardem / Brain Images by Jeffrey Lichtman /&nbsp;Animation by Shiv Kachiwala</p>