Playlist
The 13th Annual Science New Wave took place from October 16-23, 2020. The theme of the festival was "Migration." The ambitious 13th edition included 28 programs with over 80 films, with 30 countries represented.
Three animal lives entangle at the edge of the sea. Horseshoe crabs spawn on eroded urban beaches, migrating shorebirds seek sustenance at a midpoint, and humans attempt to make a difference in this age of mass extinction.
Modern society sits at the intersection of two crucial questions: What does it mean when artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly governs our liberties? And what are the consequences for the people Al is biased against? When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that most facial-recognition software does not accurately identify darker-skinned faces and the faces of women, she delves into an investigation of widespread bias in algorithms. As it turns out, artificial intelligence is not neutral, and women are leading the charge to ensure our civil rights are protected.
Not available - 13th Annual Imagine Science Film Festival (Oct 16-23, 2020)
Experimental film EMPTY HORSES documents an encounter between two much celebrated and very deceased Hungarian film directors. Michael Curtiz (1886-1962), the Oscar-winning director of Casablanca, responsible for shooting more than 150 movies during Hollywood's Golden Age, is recognised as one of history's most prolific directors. Gábor Bódy (1946-1985), in contrast, was a pioneer of experimental filmmaking and film language, as well as a renowned academic theorist in his field.
Our two spirits are locked in to the metaphysical screening room of their minds and struggle to make sense of their new reality and its creative possibilities. With two fundamentally different cinematic approaches, a prickly dialog plays out between two geniuses as they hold forth on life, work and art, while we are immersed in an associative collage of Hollywood classic and avant-garde imagery. Curtiz's and Bódy's anecdotes and personal dramas illuminate universal and contemporary questions of filmmaking, as the experience of the collective filmic memory washes over us.
Empty Horses is a found footage experimental film, a tribute to filmmaking, loosely based on the biographies of the two directors. Its original script was written by Péter Lichter, Bence Kránicz and Gábor Roboz.
You Play Here is a hybrid project exploring the themes of community, migration, and public space. Concerned with concepts related to migration, I created You Play Here in order to fully explore one question: does playing a sport in a public space work to create community and camaraderie amongst immigrant groups?
The project features an installation composed of an analogue map, made interactive with the use of an Augmented Reality (AR) application. This customized map displays New York City's public spaces where two different immigrant communities gather to collectively play a sport. The interactive aspect of the project features miniature models of these public spaces, and documentary videos that appear on a tablet while navigating the map through the help of an Augmented Reality application. The videos showcase two groups of immigrants in the United States, highlighting their recreational activities, and the ways in which these activities connect to their immigration status.
A 10-year-old Roma boy living in Sweden attempts to come to terms with the mysterious Resignation Syndrome that has put his two sisters in a coma. The tight-knit family is trying to rebuild a normal life far from their native Kosovo where they were victims of persecution. While their entire future hangs in the balance of a pending asylum request, the little boy dreams of building a spaceship to leave it all behind.
"A Demonstration" is a monster film with no monsters. Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of Early Modern European science, the film explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from today's vantage point. Early Modern naturalists were guided by a logic in which scientific truths were discovered through visual analogy. The word 'monster' comes from the latin 'monstrare', meaning to show, to reveal, to demonstrate. "A Demonstration" picks up on these themes in a poetic exploration of the boundaries of sight and the metamorphosis of form.
A lullaby before the great disaster. Two pigeons visit a zoo without animals, a snail measures his blood pressure at the doctor, in the CERN laboratory something has gone terribly wrong. Six moments from our age, like memories of the world we leave behind.
Sanzgiri's father was 18 when India ousted the last remaining Portuguese colonizers from Goa in 1961. Combining 16mm with drone footage, desktop screenshots, and Skype interviews with his father, Sanzgiri utilizes various modes of seeing at a distance to question identity, the construction of memory and anti-colonial solidarity across continents.
In PICTURE A SCIENTIST, three leading women scientists overcome brutal harassment, institutional discrimination, and years of subtle slights to revolutionize the culture of science.
Captivating portrait of one of the first Turkish immigrants in the Dutch cultural sector, interviewed by his daughter amid a colourful fashion collection inspired by his life. About the complexity of migration, revolving around a migrant who never thought migrating was complicated.
Shot in the Andes, the work Aggregate States of Matters deals with the increasing impact of climate change on remote areas. At its core, the film pivots on the ambivalent negotiation between the binary idea of nature and culture, oscillating within the contemporary discourse on the environment, and its complex layers based on scientific, philosophical, spiritual and cultural approaches. For Aggregate States of Matters, Barba worked with communities that are affected by glacier melting and its geological time becoming present today. In a cautious, yet scrutinized exploration, the film illustrates blurring and melding boundaries between human and non-human actors. While the indigenous population profits from the benefits and wealth of farming, which rapidly increase due to changing environmental conditions, they concurrently face fast-moving challenges in their spiritual and cultural lives. Deriving from an extensive dialogue with the local people, Barba sensitively draws a critical picture of a world where progress and growth have stopped making sense, without reducing the complexity of the current situation in the era of the Anthropocene. By doing so, the artist thematizes the increasing awareness and evidence of human interference on Earth, which has led to a general perception of urgency, intangibility, and a state of permanent crisis, asking the central question of representation as already posed by the scholar Rob Nixon:
"How can we convert into image and narrative disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political interventions, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time?"1
1 Rob Nixon. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011
The true story of Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman and his wife Arline. Following Richard's death in 1988, a sealed envelope was discovered. Inside was a letter written by Feynman to his high-school sweetheart and first wife Arline, unearthing a private tragedy that he had suffered when he was just 28. This is a film about that letter.
Genomic technology is sweeping across society. 2016 was declared "Generation Genome" by the UK's Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, who said in her opening statements of that year's annual report: "Genomic medicine has the potential to save costs and improve quality of care by targeting treatment, maximising benefit and reducing side effects. For patients with rare diseases, it can shorten their 'diagnostic odyssey' helping to identify therapeutic options faster and improve outcomes."
With the explosion of availability of genetic testing, both in healthcare settings and via the consumer market through companies such as 23andme and Ancestry.com, genomics is officially now relevant to all of us. Even if you choose to never partake in genetic testing yourself, the moment a biological relative has, information you are linked to becomes available in a database somewhere. The transition into the genomic era means that the definition of what constitutes a "patient" will likely have to shift as well, from the individual to the biological family.
Genetic counsellors are specially trained in how to make sense of a genetic test and how these tests impact a family. As a healthcare profession whose practitioners have expertise both in clinical genetics and in counselling, genetic counsellors have a distinct point of view on the genomic healthcare revolution taking place in the UK and elsewhere. They are responsible for "breaking down the jargon" of the genetic science while simultaneously providing their patients with very nuanced, patient-led counselling that accounts not only for the person sitting in their clinic room, but also that persons' biological family members who may also be impacted by the genetic information.
"Voices of Genetic Counsellors - So Much More Than Just a Test" features four genetic counsellors from across England recalling particularly difficult cases they have dealt with in their careers, which have left a lasting impact on them.
It affects every aspect of our lives from the moment we are born, to the food we eat, the cars we drive, and the medicines we take. This object has helped send men to the moon, and satellites into space. It is an object unlike any other, the last of its kind. A literal constant in an ever-changing world, and the weight by which all others are measured. The Last Artifact follows the high-stakes race to redefine the weight of the world, and reveals the untold story of one of the most important objects on the planet: the kilogram.
Two playful pandas demonstrate how to best survive earthquakes.
Several billion tons of earth are moved annually by humans – with shovels, excavators or dynamite. Nikolaus Geyrhalter observes people, in mines, quarries and at large construction sites, engaged in a constant struggle to take possession of the planet.
The 'mirror test' is a behavioural science experiment in which an animal is presented with a mirror to see if they recognise their own reflection, or mistake the image for another animal. Corvid birds such as magpies and jackdaws have reportedly passed this test, yet it remains uncertain if the experiment proves that an animal is self-aware.
In Mirror Test, a jackdaw explores a domestic interior, flitting between shelves and disrupting kitchen counters. Images of Jacky exploring her environment are accompanied by an interview with Kerstin and Stephan Voigt, former residents of East Germany who live with the bird. Their conversation ranges from speculations on animal intelligence to ambivalent recollections of the reunification of Germany in 1990, recalling double lives within the GDR and the self-contradictions of the capitalist democracy that consumed the East.
In the cinema the projection screen often presents reflections on human behaviour. The jackdaw in Mirror Test is elusive and inscrutable, yet observing her still makes us wonder about the inner life of other minds, whether they're human or avian.
Have you ever wondered how pictures are made? Obscura looks inside our camera to the creatures within, living lives defined by what they see through the lens. But what comes into focus when things change? The arrival of new camera components reveals the world is not as it seems. Are the photographs they produce really the whole picture?
What is behind the cinema screen? It is not surprising that cinema-in-the-cinema scenes are often used in horror films. For they irritate and unsettle by reminding us – the immobile viewers hidden in the cosy darkness – of our own questionable position. What if the forces of unlimited imagination penetrate through the canvas into our reality? What if the auditorium dissolves and with it the familiar laws of cinema itself? In a way never before seen, "tx-reverse" shows this collision of reality and cinema and draws its viewers into a vortex in which the familiar order of space and time seems to be suspended.
Revealing the molecular mechanisms that power your cells and tissues, converting food and oxygen into the flow of chemical energy that makes your body be alive. Created in collaboration with HHMI BioInteractive part of a new collection of free bio-molecular animations for science education and public exhibition, "Synthesis of ATP" combines advanced microscopy, accurate molecular models and cinematic animation to engage students and the public with inspiring biology in action at atomic scale.
Lake Urmia in Northern Iran was once the biggest lake of the Middle East.
But human influence has set its course and brought the drought.
Nowadays just 5% of the original lake remain. The rest is dried out and covered by salt.
It became a political symbol all over the country.
This cinematic essay observes the places of present and past and weaves a new narration with fragments of identity and memory.
Available only in the United States
When the air-conditioners in the city of Luanda mysteriously began to fall, Matacedo (security guard) and Zezinha (maid) embarked on a mission to retrieve the boss's AC by the end of the day. This mission leads them to Kota Mino's electrical supply store, which is secretly assembling a complex memory retrieval machine.
THE COLONY is a story about sisterhood and the evolution of communication in two of the most social creatures on earth: humans and ants. In this film of a live performance, Mona struggles to reconnect with her estranged sister Hennie, and she turns to the ant colony for inspiration. With more than 500,000 ant sisters migrating, raiding, and even reproducing as one superorganism, an army ant colony appears to Mona as the paragon of successful social existence. Informed by scientific research on ant colonies, THE COLONY ventures into speculative fiction and includes projected animations and imagery alongside live spoken and musical performance. Funny, poignant, enlightening, and just the right amount of strange, THE COLONY aims to kindle a sense of awe and understanding of our diverse biological world, while using the ant colony as a lens for understanding the ever-present challenge of human connection.
Botanist Julio Betancur and his disciple, young Cristian Castro, return to Colombia's tropical forests to explore once again their passion for nature. Through the lens of Director Guillermo Quintero, former student of Julio, we will travel in the middle of a delirious expedition that will lead us to understand the strength of their friendship and the importance of their legacy. In the diverse and almost infinite world of the tropics we will get lost next to them in the time of the jungle. Homo botanicus, what is the meaning of collecting plants forever?
In a parallel present Queens, ex-mobster Ray Tincelli lives with his younger brother Jamie, who suffers from a chronic disease. Out of options for two-bit money-making hustles and unable to cover the costs of an elite clinical treatment for Jamie, Ray turns to a strange corner of the gig economy: pulling cable through miles of forest to connect large, cubic, metal transistors that link together the booming quantum trading market. Ray doesn't know any more than the average person about the forces on Wall Street behind quantum trading, but that doesn't much matter. Out in the forest, it's pure infrastructure work– pulling a cart across treacherous terrain, receiving new bundles of cable dropped by drones buzzing above the treetops, all the while trying to outpace automated cabling carts that threaten to steal the human workers' routes. As he begins to rack up earnings from routes, it becomes clear that something else is afoot in this strange, retro-futuristic world: a case of mistaken identity involving Ray's cabling trailname, Lapsis Beeftech. As he gets pulled deeper into the forest and encounters growing hostility, Ray has to decide whether to help his fellow cablers in a plot to defeat the automated carts or get rich and get out.
Available only in the United States
Set in Istanbul's venerable Cerrahpaşa Hospital, PHASES OF MATTER follows living and inanimate residents of this teaching hospital, moving from the operating room to the morgue, between life and other states, the real and the virtual.
Five of the most brilliant scientists of our time, gathered at the famous Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, take us on their search for a groundbreaking discovery. They face an enormous challenge. Because how do you go beyond the existing frontiers of human knowledge? By becoming part of their world, we experience that a scientific breakthrough is not merely a light bulb-moment. It is a demanding process with emotional setbacks, anxiety and insecurities. But it is also driven by boundless ambition, truthfulness and unimaginable perseverance.
Dr. Yamamoto is a psychiatrist, 82 years old and about to give up his practice. In the sixties, he fought for closed psychiatric institutions to open their doors; the film Seishin, also by Kazuhiro Soda (Berlinale Forum 2008), centred on his achievements in life. This serves as the jumping off point for Seishin 0: Dr. Yamamoto receives his patients for the last time, the camera watches patiently, recording the smallest movements and gestures, the worries, the silences, the sadness and the solace. After the practice has closed, the film shifts its focus to the relationship between Mr. Yamamoto and his wife, who is suffering from dementia. His loving patience remains the most striking element; it makes the film into a document of a humanism that frees itself of any trace of sentimentality as it observes shortcomings, weakness and mental decline with ever greater precision, grasping them in tandem as simply part of human existence.
Executive Producer Fernando Meirelles (Academy Award-Nominated Director of City of God & The Constant Gardener) and Malian musician Inna Modja take us on an epic journey along Africa's Great Green Wall — an ambitious vision to grow an 8,000km 'wall' of trees stretching across the entire continent to fight back against runaway climate change, increasing conflict and mass migration.
The mines of Johannesburg have produced a third of all the gold mined in human history. But now the gold is running out, the mines are falling apart and the city must confront an environmental nightmare: Tons of radioactive waste that pollute the air and turn water into poison. Glamorous grandmother Mariette Liefferink is on a relentless mission to uncover the truth and force the gold industry to clean up it's dangerous mess. The film follows Mariette's journey from a housewife to becoming one of the 100 most influential people in the mining world. She believes that God has lost interest in humankind, and that it's her duty to restore a sense of justice in the world. Jozi Gold is a multistrand exposé of mine pollution, and in that, a story about wealth, human ambition and modern Africa.
Taiwan is an island country. Although it is surrounded by the sea, its people fear the sea since the politics, the history and the religious beliefs held on this island make people turn their backs to the sea.
Oceanic literature author Liao Hung-chi and underwater photographer Ray Chin lead the audience out to the sea and into the water. They prompt us to understand the sea and to think about the possibility that the ocean might become our lives and the future of our country.
Taiwan is not only an island but also a sleeping whale. Since a whale does not belong to the land, it has to wake up and swim towards its future full of possibilities.
ONCE YOU KNOW is the intimate journey of director Emmanuel Cappellin across the abyss of a world at the edge of climate-induced collapse. His voyage into this uncharted territory is that of a whole generation turning to climate scientists, local democracy, grassroots initiatives, and mass rebellion in a courageous search for an exit.
Think this film matters? Please, consider supporting Once You Know's crowdfunding campaign. Only with your help will the film reach more people: https://chuffed.org/project/extinctionrebellion-onceyouknow
For all educational, institutional, and community screening licenses, please contact arlin@videoproject.com
Depicting a world rapidly becoming overrun with toxic material, THE STORY OF PLASTIC brings into focus an alarming, man-made crisis. Striking footage, original animations, and archival material combine in this timely documentary to point to the disastrous impact of the manufacture and use of plastics, shedding new light on a pressing global challenge that threatens the life expectancy of animals, humans, and Earth itself.
At the frenzy of the Space Race almost 100.000 people on both sides of the Iron Curtain signed up to fly to the Moon at the PanAm's First Moon Flights Club. World was split to two realities of the East and the West, but there was just one Moon, for everybody.
Following the filmmaker´s grandfather, one of the fellow club members, TICKET TO THE MOON asks what did the mere thought and imagination of a trip to the Moon mean to these potential space travellers – on both sides of the Iron Curtain? What were they imagining to find? And how is this relevant for us now?
Today, 50 years after the Moonlanding, we are still dreaming about space, setting off for various missions - moon, mars and further on. Are the "Moon" generation's dreams and aspirations the same as ours?
Laika, a stray dog, was the first living being to be sent into space and thus to a certain death. According to a legend, she returned to Earth as a ghost and has roamed the streets of Moscow ever since. Following her trace, and filmed from a dog's perspective, SPACE DOGS accompanies the adventures of her descendants: two street dogs living in today's Moscow. Their story is one of intimate fellowship but also relentless brutality, and is interwoven with unseen archive material from the Soviet cosmic era. A magical tale of voyagers scouting for unknown spaces.
A cinematic exploration of the unique soundscape of one of Europe's oldest radio stations, Radio Belgrade, with a synesthetic insight into what makes us remember, think, understand, discover and feel.
One hundred years before the internet, a self-declared tech guru started preaching the future to his flock of outsiders. Meet the most influential nerd you may never have heard of: Hugo Gernsback. Decades in advance he foresaw Skype, jetpacks, space mining and drones. But even though he would accumulate over 80 patents throughout his life and befriend the likes of Edison and Tesla, his most influential invention remains Science Fiction. Gernsback planted the seeds for pop-culture phenomena such as Superman, Star Wars and a whole nation's obsession with UFOs.
Based on the handwritten accounts of Dr James Niven, public health officer for Manchester, England, this film tells the harrowing true story of the flu that decimated the world's population immediately after the carnage of World war One. It is estimated that 50 million died in the three waves of infection that followed.
A young filmmaker investigates the legend of Manivelle, an automaton gifted to Lebanon in 1945 that still haunts an abandoned mansion in Beirut. After being coaxed back out into the limelight, the people who knew him come forward to speak their mind, and the myth that Manivelle has constructed around himself starts to unravel.
A group of mourners and a man spat from the depths of Hades build a boat from the debris of New Orleans to rescue their lost loved ones trapped beneath the sea.
An exploration of what animals the people of Havana want to be in another life. Inspired by Nicolas Guillen El Gran Zoo.
A failed marriage. A watchmaker. Meteorites. Time is uncomfortably relative in this Kerala town, and our hero struggles to make the perfect watch to keep up with the times.
In a version of Kolkata, India rendered unliveable by sea level rise, things take a dark turn when a family of climate change refugees are ambushed by a tiger on the flooded streets.
From the Big-Bang, to understanding our place in the cosmos, we explore the Universe through the imagination of children. "The Universe Within" is a 4 episode series for kids made by kids, and the protagonists explain different astronomical concepts using metaphors invented by them, and create theories for the questions that have not yet been answered by science. Their explanations are illustrated by animations based on their own drawings so we can see how they imagine everything they are telling us about our Universe.
In the episode (The Beginning of the Universe) submitted for this festival, Joaquin (9) asks himself how the Universe began. He narrates a native Tehuelche myth about the Earth's origins. Then, he explains the Big Bang Theory, using metaphors and drawings of his own. Lastly, he questions the theory and comes up with his own answers.
TESTFILM is a series of projects in which Telcosystems address the impact of new technological developments in digital filmmaking and their implications for the future of artists' cinema. In TESTFILM #1 they explore the creative possibilities of the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) – the new global infrastructure for film projection in cinemas. By 2015, this digital standard had completely replaced analogue film projection around the world. Could one upset the default behavior of the DCP system and unearth its artistic potential? (A practice that has been an integral part of the history of cinema.) Or is the system designed to exclude any possibility of human intervention? If so, what happens to the history and the future of experimental cinema and the renegades who refuse to play by the rules?
'Story' is a reflection about modern man in an age of omnipresent technology. Looking through stories - a popular function in many social media platforms - we see people who are lonely, lost or already indifferent about reality surrounding them. Action takes place during one day and it's told by short, often (auto)ironic scenes, where virtual world sinks to reality.
Sharks have gotten a raw deal. But don't take my word for it, you can hear it right from the source in "Smiles". This in an inside look into the world of Sharks with interviews from the majestic creatures themselves. They have been portrayed as monsters, lifeless eating machines and in some cases tornadoes of death, and they just want a chance to tell their side of things.
When an astronaut ponders on the quietude of space, he comes upon a startling self-realisation. The truth is written in the stars, but what will he uncover?
After Chernobyl tragedy, fifty thousand people were forced to leave their hometown Pripyat. Thirty years after the disaster, most of the things from Pripyat is stolen or wasted. One of the few things which has left are pianos, as they were too heavy to move away. Who would believe they are still able to play?
Born and raised deep in Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin, eighty-six year old fisherman Wilven Hayes has spent a lifetime living off the land. His tenacity and endurance is the stuff of lore. Wilven shares his love for the Atchafalaya as he grapples with the shifting environment of the basin and the conditions that threaten the existence that sustains him. OF THE BASIN is an intimate portrait of a unique environment, and a means to celebrate and honor Wilven Hayes, one of the last fishermen of the Basin.
The Xochimilcan Axolotl is an endemic species to Mexico City. It's currently critically endangered because of water pollution issues. Even though it's a tiny animal, it's extinction would affect us all. "Now I'm an Axolotl" tells the story of the demise of the Axolotl, repercussions and possible solutions.
Through interweaving dance and dialogue, Material Bodies is a sensual and cinematic look at the relationship between amputees and their limbs. This visceral and colourful short film explores how a prosthetic leg can be more like a piece of jewellery, a dance companion, or a part of you.
Available only in the United States
This stunning otherworldly short film takes a deep dive into lichen, a species that confounds scientists to this day. Shot in macro 3D, Lichen offers us a look at this remarkable life form and asks what we might learn from it. Ancient and diverse, both an individual and a community, lichens can live in the most extreme environments, including outer space. This meditative film bridges science and philosophy, and the words of lichenologist Trevor Goward illuminate the terrain in poetic and thought-provoking ways.
In 1946, eight months after the atomic bombings, an American army film team made a feature documentary in Japan. Several reels are shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki including the "11004".
Eight prototypes for a border wall stand on the US-Mexico border. To choose a winning design, Border Patrol officers and the military will attempt to climb, dig under, or breach the structures using techniques employed by immigrants and drug dealers.
The Warsaw University Botanic Garden is a kind of laboratory for an artist, a researcher and a scientist. The fractal shapes of plants, evolutionary chaos, the fascinating way of plant reproduction – the people in the film encounter it all this in the space of one of the smallest botanic gardens in the world.
In Vitro is set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above.
In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard's ailing founder, 70-year-old Dunia is lying in her deathbed, as 30-year-old Alia comes to visit her. Alia is born underground as part of a comprehensive cloning program and has never seen the town she's destined to rebuild.
The film is about the importance of biodiversity for the cultural identity and the economic independence of Latin America. This animated documentary is based on a conversation with Brigitte Baptiste—leading biodiversity expert, transgender activist, and longtime head of the "Instituto Humboldt", the world's only institute for biodiversity research. The interview was recorded in Bogota in 2019.
"Helfer" is about a young woman who is struggling with anxiety and recurring nightmares that she wants to end. She is seeking a helper, who offers an alternative solution, but in the process she must confront her biggest fears. The film details their relationship in a surreal world through symbolic events.
Jade considers FREYA (her Federally Regulated Enquiry and Yield Assistant) a friend. But when a one-night stand doesn't go as planned, Jade is forced to question FREYA and the system she represents. Set in the not-too-distant future, FREYA will make you second guess your relationship with technology, social media, and The State.
Available only in the United States
In the city water pump there are 8 clams. The lives of millions of people depend on them. In case of contamination of water supply, the clams will close and automatically shut off the water for the city. The main scientist-malacologist watches over the system's operation.
The film is a philosophical essay on dependence people from nature and the world around them.
In Brazil, the inhabitants of Teewald, a German colony founded at the end of the 19th century, are still proud of their Germanic roots. Starting with the text of German-Turkish researcher Ilhami Paker, which uses irony to analyse different migratory movements, the film questions the complex process of constructing a national identity.
Exploration between the characters and the filmmaker. A quest into a universal existential problem, how to inhabit the world. Members of a family leave their home and in the middle of the Cuban Sierra Maestra struggle to find a new one. During this process, they inhabit scenes of routine life in the middle of nature, outside of a closed space between four walls, place and concept they long and project. It concludes with the departure of the patriarch and the already palpable absence of a father with a dark gaze who dreams of going far away from his country in the pursuit of something different, becomes a reality. Contemplative meditation of internal torment.
A data driven exploration into the universal capacity for growth.
May 29th, 2019, celebrated 100 years of the eclipse observed from Sobral, in the interior of Ceará, which was the first experimental proof of the Theory of General Relativity, proposed four years before by German physicist Albert Einstein.
April 23: seen from a forestry road, a raven takes flight from a stand of pines. Behind it, in the middle of the woods, lies the carcass of a freshly killed deer. Obviously the work of coyotes whose songs can be heard at night. Surveillance cameras are set up awaiting their return. In the meantime, the regular visitors of these scenes come and go: ravens, vultures and other animals passing through. The months go by; the seasons transform the forest. The infrared cameras mechanically record the long parade of fauna that populate the area. By the end of the year, the accumulated images have given shape to a story. In parallel to our world, a deer has disappeared. We remain on the edge, distant witnesses to a continuing cycle. Left on the ground are but few traces, the last clues to an animal rite. Slowly, they are covered over by pine needles.
Fashion model Hinata wants to get at the bottom of her uneasiness but something is hindering her. A designer gives her advice, a doctor tries to get her attention and all claim to know what she needs. The result of an old trauma seems only to be the tip of the iceberg.
An old Cosmonaut lives the same kind of life now in his flat in a concrete panel apartment building as he did in his youth in a space station. As before, he still carries out heroic missions and misses his close relatives, who he left behind on his home planet. His close relatives see the situation altogether differently. Is this old man capable of coming to grips with the norms that apply in society? A cosmonaut will always be a cosmonaut. To the very end.
'It was in 1894 that I first visited Ben Nevis. Young physicists were sometimes welcomed in the Observatory for short periods in the summer to take the place of observers on holiday. I offered myself for this work and it was arranged that I should spend a fortnight on the summit.'
This is Charles Wilson at the beginning of his career. His efforts to recreate atmospheric effects in the lab resulted in the first particle detector: the expansion cloud chamber. The sharp vapour trails of alpha and beta particles made for beautiful graphic pictures. I realised there are no images directly resulting from the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider as the research is based on statistical data. When I learned that the innermost sensor of the CMS detector is actually similar to the construction of a camera, I tried interpreting the data as images. Crude digital counterparts of Wilson's historical images appeared.
A young woman learns that soon she will have to move from the blockhouse flat she lives in. After receiving the upsetting news from the owner of the flat she is overwhelmed with emotions. Her teardrop of farewell grows into a concrete monolith. When the drop hits the ground a surreal panorama of the blockhouse area - she used to call home - unfolds...
During a PowerPoint presentation, statistical diagrams are breaking free from the strait-jacket of their coordinates. A trip into the sensual world of statistics begins. Pie charts are melting, arrow diagrams twisting, scatter plots, bar graphs and stock market curves join in a collective climax.
Algeria, 1961. France has just detonated its fourth atomic bomb. A group of seven soldiers is sent to the point of impact to take samples and measure radioactivity. But the further they go, the more the Captain, a war veteran in his fifties, is confronted with the paradoxes of a changing world.
Spaces expand or disappear. Oceans become deserts. Rock erodes to sand and dust and human kind is passing by all this. Since the beginning of our existence, we are constantly moving from one place to another, fleeing hunger, war or the forces of nature, but also driven by a sense of longing for change. "At the Bottom of the Sea" traces forms of migration, interweaving them with geological and archaeological cartographies. In magical tableaux, the film draws a cinegraphic melancholy where a border fence is not even useful for a comma on earth's timeline.
Aurochs is the name given to the wild ancestor of modern cattle. The aurochs has the distinction of being the first documented case of extinction. The last known wild aurochs died in the Jaktorów Forest in Poland in 1627. Hunting and the introduction of domesticated cattle led to their decline and disappearance. Their value, however, derived not just from them being a source of sustenance. Traits that were attributed to the animal, such as speed, strength, and courage, imbued it with great symbolic power. Some of their body parts were ascribed with supernatural powers. The skin of the forehead and a cross-shaped bone inside the heart were prized for their magical properties. Those who carried them became possessors of the animal's traits.
In the 20th century efforts to bring back the Aurochs from extinction began to materialize.
"Coronation" (2020) is a documentary film about the lockdown in Wuhan, China, during the Covid-19 outbreak in the spring of 2020.
On December 1, 2019, the first patient with Covid-19 symptoms was identified in Wuhan. Chinese officials repeatedly denied that human-to-human transmission was possible, concealed the number of diagnosed patients, and punished medical staff for disclosing information about the epidemic. On January 23, 2020, Wuhan was placed under a city-wide lockdown. Covid-19 has become a global pandemic, with over 22 million people infected and over 780,000 deaths.
"Coronation" examines the political specter of Chinese state control from the first to the last day of the Wuhan lockdown. The film records the state's brutally efficient, militarized response to control the virus. Sprawling emergency field hospitals were erected in a matter of days, 40,000 medical workers were bused in from all over China, and the city's residents were sealed into their homes.
The film takes us into the heart of these temporary hospitals and ICU wards, showing the entire process of diagnosis and treatment. Patients and their families are interviewed, reflecting their thinking about the pandemic and expressing anger and confusion over the state's callous restriction of their liberties. The film also takes us into the private lives of individuals living under the lockdown: a couple attempt to return to their home in Wuhan, a courier delivers essentials to residents barred from leaving their community, an emergency construction worker stuck in limbo is forced to live out of his car, a former party cadre and her son debate the function of the media and the party's response to the outbreak, a grieving son navigates the bureaucracy of retrieving his father's ashes.
China has assumed the status of superpower on the global stage, yet it remains poorly understood by other nations. Through the lens of the pandemic, "Coronation" clearly depicts the Chinese crisis management and social control machine—through surveillance, ideological brainwashing, and brute determination to control every aspect of society. The film shows the changes that took place in a city and in individual space under the impact of the virus; it illustrates the value of individual life in the political environment, reflecting on the difficulties we face as individuals and countries in the context of globalization. Ultimately, the result is a society lacking trust, transparency, and respect for humanity. Despite the impressive scale and speed of the Wuhan lockdown, we face a more existential question: can civilization survive without humanity? Can nations rely on one another without transparency or trust?
Ai Weiwei remotely directed and produced the film from Europe. The filming was done by ordinary citizens living in Wuhan.
"How thin is the human skin? What does it hide behind? The leather bag of apocalypse."
Bile is an introspective essay on the notion of the human body as political metaphor. Layer-by-layer the film digs down in order to reach answers to the proposed questions: what is body, what is illness and finally, what is death. A journey through the history of medical imaging and a reflection on the recent death of the director's mother in the decorations of post-Soviet Russia. Getting under the skin of the viewer, the film attempts to comprehend the complex subject of corporeality. The title Bile refers to the physical and mental conditions of the human being. In fact, black bile comes from the old Greek for melancholy: melas cholè.
Nica, 21, drops out of her university course in agronomics and returns home to Apulia in southern Italy after three years away. She finds her father deep in debt, a polluted, devastated region, and olive trees destroyed by a parasite. Everyone seems to have given up in the face of the vast ecological disaster, while her father is obsessed with uprooting the olive grove to make money from the land. Nica fights with all her might to save the ancient trees. But the pollution has also contaminated people's minds, and she will have to face unexpected obstacles…
Winner of the Best Documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival, master filmmaker Patricio Guzmán's The Cordillera of Dreams completes his trilogy (with Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button) investigating the relationship between historical memory, political trauma, and geography in his native country of Chile. It centers on the imposing landscape of the Andes that run the length of the country's Eastern border. At once protective and isolating, magisterial and indifferent, the Cordillera serves as an enigmatic focal point around which Guzmán contemplates the enduring legacy of the 1973 military coup d'état.
In the midst of an insomnia pandemic that gradually rises to a global catastrophe, Laura (39) and Augusto (42) flee from the city in their motorhome in an attempt to get away from chaos. As they travel along the road, the world becomes a stranger and more dangerous place.
A group of people wander over a field at the foot of a cloud-covered mountain range. Here and there, swings have been set up in the broad landscape and the people queue up obediently to sit on them for a few rounds. Sarah Francis returns to this scene again and again. In between, we follow a creation story from the beginnings of humanity to the establishment of religion, culminating in digital clouds that weave together facts and myths surrounding the moon. The moon is the quiet centre of this system; it floats over the people as their constant companion and at the same time becomes their property. From the first lunar landing via territorial partitioning to space as the "final frontier," the same discourses of power, ownership, territory and nationality that determine life on earth also shape this celestial body. Kama fissamaa' kathalika ala al-ard is a quiet, understated essay that weaves together images, texts and sounds into a dense mesh of signs. Humans may be at the centre here, but, as part of the universe, they are also infinitesimally small.
Wandering between the scientific and the psychedelic, "Earth's Answer" is a reflection on the meaning of images, their nature and durability (and a homage to the poem "Earth's Answer" by William Blake).
We follow the thread of the thoughts of a man who could be just well an astrophysicist, CERN archivist or a musician. In his mental and sensorially graphic journey, the narrator leads us in a reflection on the infinitely large and the infinitely small, memory and machines, entropy .. and worlds in formation...
Aquí y allá is an essay film that studies what being at home means. The filmmaker uses photographs, maps and Google Earth to connect places around the globe; not just from her own past, but also from the complex migratory history of her family that stretches back to Hitler-era Germany and Mao's China. Reality and the virtual prove equally confusing: however much you zoom in, you never get closer to home.
Sofia is panicky, again. The Universe decides to contact her. An other-wordly dialogue. A planet symphony for Mars, where people dream awake and fight for love.
Using the dancing body as a metaphor, The Circadian Cycle examines morphology, biological rhythm and animal behaviour. The film charts a day from sunrise to evening, moving through cycles of nature, from nascence and awakening to predation and death.
Janus 2155 is 8 minutes video. This video is a scientific fiction that uses images from a real scientific experiment based on a very small optomechanical object. It invites the viewer to follow the production of such an object until its laboratory experience. The narrator's point of view (voice over in the film) is in the distant future, as if the images we are looking at are the last traces or the scientific archives of the 21st century. One of the main questions of this video is based on the status of the scientist seen as the craftsman of a new world. The question is not what the scientist is producing, rather to understand the place and role of science in the 21st century.
When the fireworks inflame the memory of a war survival.
In a stray-dog refuge in Morocco, time seems to stand still for the 750 animals waiting to be adopted, their lives following a precise, monotonous routine.
A small island off the coasts of Brittany; the weather is stormy, the wind is blowing, and dark clouds are obscuring the sky. The sun highlights the shape of a tree, a house, a passer-by, for a brief instant. Then a thunderstorm breaks out…