Science New Wave Festival XI

In a dark expanse that could be the cosmos, we hear the voice of Arthur C. Clarke, whose face – taken from a BBC archive dating back to the 1960s – appears in the distance. His features quickly dematerialize into a multitude of shimmering pixels, creating an enveloping and immersive space out of which the thoughts of the famed author of «2001: A Space Odyssey » emerge. At the heart of this spectral environment, and with a magnetic voice sending us back to the time of cathode ray tubes and the golden age of television broadcasting, A C. Clarke tells us about the arrival of digital revolution, decades ahead of his time. This film is an invitation to travel, and a crepuscular form of poetry to be experienced immersively.

MIRA is a magical realist short that contemplates the relationship between the life cycle of galaxies, the immortal jellyfish, and a young marine biologist's own mind as she risks her life to pursue the work she loves.

This short documentary focuses on the research of acclaimed Dutch neuroscientist Floris de Lange. In his 'Prediction lab' he explores what predictions do with our perception. Inspired by the film 'Robocop' in his teens, De Lange became interested in the human brain and the question of whether you could reproduce it. But when he realized that no one has ever succeeded to create artificial intelligence that can perceive as well as humans do, this became his first step in his research to understand our brain.

A collaboration between a photographer, a poet, an animator and an electronic music producer. Linnea Rundgren is a unique photographer, who uses an electron microscope to take viewers into hitherto unseen realms of life – past, present and future.
Over the past several years she has accumulated an extraordinary collection of images – ancient single-celled fossils; human, animal and insect anatomy; crystalline structures; …and nanotechnology. No one who sees her pictures can remain unaffected. This includes Hugo The Poet, who met Linnea in Melbourne and was struck by the innovative work that she does. The two decided to collaborate on a cross-over piece, using Linnea's photos to tell a story of life. Linnea put many of her best pictures into a narrative order and Hugo weaved a poem that tells a form of retrospective creation myth, incorporating not only evolution but also the coming dawn of nanotechnology. What they now required was music and vision. For music, it was an easy choice. One electronic music pioneer from Belgium has created music that can sum up the confluence and flow and creativity of life on Earth from its inception to the nano-tech world that is to come. Sk'p is a truly extraordinary artist, and his style is perhaps best exemplified in his masterpiece Eye Earth Pt. 2. He has kindly given permission for this track to be used in the piece. On the vision side, there came on board Dave Abbott – a Photo/Video, VFX, animation and editing renegade also based in Melbourne – who set to work turning a simple slideshow of still images into an immersive fully animated experience. This all culminated in the work that you are about to see. A soliloquy from the Earth itself, congratulating life for all its inventiveness over the past several billion years, and giving some encouragement – and some caution – for the next stage of nano-technological creativity.

Solar Walk shows the journey of individuals and their creations on through time and space. Any meaning of action is only existent from the perspective of the individual, but never mandatory when looking at it from the perspective of a solar system. It's about the melancholy of accepting chaos as beautiful and cosmic. Passion for creation is projected through the unique and playful texture of the animation craft itself.

Singularity Song" is a meditation on black holes, pairing legendary butoh dancer, Oguri, with the voices one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Kip Thorne and black hole physicist Rana Adhikari. Oguri performs the human embodiment of imagined life within a black hole as a narrator describes the events which occured billions of years ago which led to the breakthrough first detection of gravitational waves, in 2015. This detection earned the team of Kip Thorne, Barry Barish and Rai Weiss the Nobel Prize in 2017.
Oguri's body floats and undulates through textures of metallic fabric as voices describe the mystery at the center of the black hole. The center has been called "a point of infinite density" or the "singularity" and as Thorne's voice expresses in the piece, if we can understand the singularity, we can understand the origins of the universe. A song composed and sung by Rachel Mason weaves in and out of vocalizations by indie rock icon Carla Bozulich and experimental composer Anna Homler. These sounds were recorded by Rachel Mason at a noise show at Zebulon in Los Angeles, California.
Kip Thorne is revered for his groundbreaking work on black holes, gravitational waves and speculations about the possibilities of time travel through wormholes. His work was the foundation for Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. Rana Adhikari one of the chief architects of LIGO and an expert on black holes. Mason conducted interviews with Thorne and Adhikari at their Caltech offices. Singularity Song is the first part of a larger project called "The Moving Mountain," a fiscally sponsored program of Fulcrum Arts, whose goal is to create new works of live performance and film based upon the poetic imagery that emerges from conversations with physicists.
A Moving Mountain Production
The Moving Mountain is a project of Fulcrum Art's EMERGE Fiscal Sponsorship Program

A serene tour through the diffuse interstellar matter in our Galaxy.

The film takes you on a journey through a world, where there is no spoken language, but it is crossed by different vibrations created by the creatures that inhabit it. Every living being can communicate, hunt, eat, drink or even move using particular ranges of sound. Due to the heavy task they want to execute sing vibrations, they'll need an enormous strength to create the right amount of air pressure and reach the strongest range of the infra sound and ultrasound, so that they'll need multiple sources of sound frequencies. That is why most of these creatures have two throats instead of one. The ability to correctly use these throats is fundamental to survive in this world.

Phosphenes blend 2D digital animation and photo-animation to explore the processes of developing thoughts and the understanding of birth, life, and death in the natural world.

Ex Nihilo is an experimental short documentary about life, death and our attempts to control them. It tells the stories of an advanced humanoid robot, a cryonics facility, where the brains of deceased people are held and of a international seed vault, where crop seed from around the world are held frozen.

A scientist studying the first human time traveller falls in love with her subject. But if her research succeeds they will become separated by eons of history. She must find a way to connect with him across the ages or lose him forever.

In the first evidences of mankind in the south of Brazil we meet, side by side, the visible and the invisible parts of a story.

Braden Allenby, an engineer and ethicist at Arizona State University and Conor Walsh, a biomedical engineer at Harvard and founder of the Harvard Biodesign Lab, discuss what our bodies might look like in the future. What does it mean to be human when we can use new tools to alter our phenotype? Is the use of engineering to change the human form new or are we simply using new methods to satisfy an evolutionary desire for change? With explosive animation by the animation team at Moth Studio, and sound by Skillbard.

An elderly lady pursues her audiophile obsessions. When she is absent she records the sound of her house to listen to it later.

For the third and final contribution to Contour 8 Biennale, inhabitants has commissioned Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil in order to host an urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and post-mortem justice.
Filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil, in collaboration with artist Jackson Polys, investigate the recent court case that decided the fate of the remains of a prehistoric Paleoamerican man found in Kennewick, Washington State in 1996. The case pitted the Umatilla people and other tribes, who wanted to provide a burial to the "Ancient One", against two scientists—one of which from the publicly-funded Smithsonian Institute—who wanted to study the "Kennewick Man". In order for the claim to fall under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) it became necessary to establish the lineage of these remains. This fight unleashed a controversy with groups attempting to establish white ancestry, and with this seeking to altogether undermine the indigenous sovereignty over land and ancestors and annul centuries of colonial violence. The evolving science of DNA and cranial morphology was grotesquely called in to testify to the purity of the bones' ethnicity, where native claims to embodied knowledge of its origin had little means of addressing the court. Despite all of this, the Umatilla people and other tribes ultimately repatriated the "Ancient One" and he was reburied earlier this year in 2017.

An interview with David Stodolsky, member of the Cryonics Institute describe the cryonic procedure and the ideas of preserving bodies for thousands of years in the future, he guides us through the Building-Monument built over the previous house of Walter Gropius in Dessau, Germany. Renovated by Bruno Fioretti Marquez Architects in 2008, the construction reproduces the original volume of Gropius' house. In the film, the house works as a metaphor of what is fossilized. The idea of Modernism remains in this case in a fossil state, and survives in time as a trace of what once was.

A fictionalized retelling of one of the great discoveries of the 20th century: the rabies vaccine.
France, 1885. Little Albertine lives just across the laboratory of famous professor Louis Pasteur. Every night, from her bedroom window, she watches him as he works… But what is he doing to these rabbits?!

Nyctophobia is an essay-documentary about psychological distress. Jean-François Boisvenue tells us about his childhood fears and his history of mental illness. On the screen, we can see a series of hand-drawn animations projected onto his body that plunges us into psychosis and depersonalization. The whole was captured by the camera without postproduction effects.

Bird Watch is a mockumentary mini-series that documents Kuwait and the mean-region from the perspective of peripheral and/or minorities. The second episode, titled "Health", is about a child's point of view of a healthful lifestyle.

Dust surrounds us endlessly. We fight a Sisyphean battle with it in our homes. It makes us sneeze. What could be more mundane? But those tiny specks actually have astonishing power. This 25-minute documentary film takes you on an eye-opening journey with dust from the microscopic to the global scale. Along the way, you'll meet scientists on the cutting edge of dust research, as well as people whose lives have been threatened by dust. You'll discover that dust can be both life-giving and deadly in turn, and that its impact is shifting as Earth's climate warms. You'll never look at dust the same way again.

Have you ever wondered about the evolution of human tool use? How are Paleolithic stone tools related, cognitively, to the development of genetic engineering tools like CRISPR? Genevieve Dewar, a paleoanthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Toronto, and Kate Krueger, a molecular biologist and research director at the nonprofit New Harvest, explain some of the larger implications of our desire to mold the world around us. Wild and woolly stop-motion animation by Amia Yokoyama with sound by Skillbard.

A new medical procedure promises to free America from persistent "racial glaucoma".

A man desperately tries to scrape off his father's birthmark.

Downside Up reveals a world populated only by people with Down syndrome. One day, a boy is born who is different. He is not 'normal', because he looks a little bit different and behaves a little bit unusual. This is his story, and that of his parents and the society as a whole.

Hypnagogia is a short animated abstract movie, which depicts visual sensory phenomena of pseudo-hallucinations, so called "hypnagogic", experienced when crossing the borders of sleep. Film is balancing between poetry and documentary, trying to catch the feel of loosing the control over your consciousness and mind wandering.

Luna is a vibrant young Chinese American girl who dreams of becoming an astronaut. From the day she witnesses a rocket launching into space on TV, Luna is driven to reach for the stars. In the big city, Luna lives with her loving father Chu, who supports her with a humble shoe repair business he runs out of his garage. As Luna grows up, she enters college, facing adversity of all kinds in pursuit of her dreams.

As Hector, a night guard at the Museum of Natural History rushes for work, he forgets to turn off the bathtub faucet and accidentally floods New York City. His daughter Melissa comes to rescue as museum exhibits come to life. The blue whale and the giant squid push the museum towards the open ocean. Melissa dives to receive an evolution lecture from a Coelacanth fish. In the morning the museum is safely returned to its usual place, Hector closes the faucet and cleans up the mess to Melissa's amusement.

The film is about an alien boy, Hugo, who's living on a small, far-away planet. One day he gets his first pet as a present – a real scuba diver taken from Earth. His excitement about the diver knows no limits, and in his childlike selfishness he doesn't realize that he's playing his terrible yet cute games with an intelligent human being.

Tora, a two-mouthed tigerlike creature, is looking for something to eat. It runs into a pile of eggs, but the egg Tora snatches from it hatch in its mouth! Outcomes Pinki that tastes so disgusting Tora can't eat it, but it seems Tora also can't get rid of Pinki who seems to think Tora is its mother. The short film is the pilot episode of Planet Z animated TV series that is based on the comics of Maria Björklund.

Since their existence was discovered on this planet, what we know about dinosaurs and what they looked like hasn't stopped changing. Follow Ralph's adventures in the world of dinosaurs and have fun learning or refreshing your ideas about what you think you already know.

An eccentric physicist in a room seemingly adrift in space explains the fundamental principles of physics using slapstick metaphors.

"Machines could take 50% of jobs in the next 30 years"
Moshe Vardi, Professor of computer science, Rice University
Meet Alice, holder of the last recognisable job on Earth, trying to make sense of her role in an automated world.
'The Last Job on Earth' is a film produced in collaboration with the Guardian Sustainable Business section.

The year 2068. The gallery owner Alma leads the journalist Marius through "The gallery of lost trades". By means of impressive paintings it depicts the historical downfall of whole fields of trades and professions. The theory behind the exhibition: Mankind abrogates himself. A stimulating discourse about the bearing of the digital-technical evolution takes its course…

Experimental machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, generated the sound and images in this video. Typically machine learning algorithms are used for commercial and political objectives and trained on massive datasets from resources such as Facebook, Google, and YouTube. For this project the algorithms trained on short, fuzzy, old home videos of amusement parks.

At the height of the Internet age, the first driverless car casualty sets off a chain of events for CEO Lazarus, Chief Executive Officer of technology conglomerate and driverless car company, Dyne Motors.
Amid plummeting stocks and investor faith, Dyne Motors enlists the aid of a former race car driver to become a human crash test dummy to test artificial intelligence in its driverless cars, resulting in the creation of its newest driverless car model.

A documentary study of the eye and its functions. A compilation of images from various places gives the function of the eye new meanings. It is a tool for instilling fear, the soldier uses it to find his target, and looking into the eye of your executioner can cause him to doubt his actions. What happens when the eye stops looking?

A fable for the media-saturated age.
In a world of viral videos, memes, and fake news, cats ride skateboards and people get struck by lightning, as one man erodes the boundary between his online world and his real life.

Someone is missing. Plants grow, but at what cost? Technology threatens and seduces as humans attempt to solve a mystery through telepathy and mirrors. Stainless steel and broken glass strewn about an intergalactic discotheque.
Commissioned by the Chicago Film Archives and made in collaboration with sound artist Brian Kirkbride, with footage and sound from the archive chopped, manipulated and arpeggiated into a fertile mix of anthem and narrative.

Four Winds Wellness Association presents a fictional documentary on Dr. Miles Bennell and Dr. Patricia Lunbed, the founders of Link 8. The video tells the story of how Miles and Patricia meet and form a new technology that influences science and culture called Personality Sharing.

In the immediate future, as technology increasingly invades human existence, the Renewed® company offers personality and interest updates as a means to stay connected to the rest of society. When Isaac finds that the domotics in his home no longer respond to his requests due to a compatibility problem, he must go to Renewed® to seek solutions he may not want.

My grandmother was convinced that the only animal that made the same mistake twice is the human being.
An essay short film about my very own Internet, a parallel world where memory loss, errors, surveillance and addiction smear everything and everyone.

This devilish horror art-doc elucidates the mysterious link between evil and the infamous Santa Ana Winds through a collection of visual allegories and testimonials from denizens of the deserts. The "Red Wind" originates inland and blows through the coastal Southern California. Legend has it that these extremely dry down-slope hot airs cause drastic mood swings among Angelenos, sparking tensions and uneasy wrathful human behaviors.

Wind Should Be Heard Not Seen takes us on a lyrical journey through countries and cultures, connected by an unlikely foe: dust. Originating in the deserts of Western China, gigantic dust clouds rise, engulfing everything in their path. Blowing across the globe, the film rides the winds of our changing planet, connecting us all through the air we breathe. Taking its name from a Mongolian proverb – "wind should be heard, but never seen" – the film bears witness to human adaptation in the face of increasing environmental change: but is it our greatest strength, or our downfall?

The Imperial Valley represents one of California´s most important regions of industrial agriculture. Corporate agricultural production interests have been able to successfully cultivate and exploit this geological part of the Sonora desert through a gigantic irrigation system fed by the Colorado River, as well as the All-American Canal specifically engineered for this purpose and which attained sad notoriety through the Mexican migration movement. The system´s run-off flows through pipes, pumps and canals leading to the Salton Sea, an artificial lake that is approaching ecological as well as economic disaster, just as bordering regions of Mexico.
With Imperial Valley (cultivated run-off) Lukas Marxt approaches this problem in a very ingenious way. He begins with a bird´s eye view of an irrigation canal coursing through a desert landscape. A drone camera flies the length of the canal, subsequently flying over Imperial Valley landscapes from the same perspective. Initially appearing as nothing more than spectacular documents of agricultural monocultures, the shots become increasingly abstract – additionally heightened through the accompaniment of an electronic score. Is this an actual or artificially simulated landscape? This ambiguity is precisely the point: The Imperial Valley is becoming the "Uncanny Valley", a place that is not yet or no longer natural and thereby appears eerie. A landscape post landscape (or its medial representation) is a geometric concept of lines, surfaces, points and color spots, regardless whether of an animate or lifeless nature. Although manmade, it is not a place for people anymore, neither ontologically nor in reality. The post-apocalypse is not a matter of the future, we are already in the thick of it.

The forests of Wayqecha, Peru rely on moisture from clouds to sustain themselves but climate change is moving that cloud layer higher every year. Plant ecologist Dan Metcalfe is in the midst of a bold experiment: by eliminating the cloud layer from a portion of the forest, he is attempting to see what exactly will happen as the cloud forest dries out.

Ancient, beautiful, fragile, vulnerable yet somewhat resilient, corals have inhabited out planet for hundreds of millions of years. Scientists have been studying them for decades but there is still so much to learn about these remarkable creatures. Using groundbreaking cinematographic techniques that expand the limits of our senses and perceptions, we can now view these animals for the first time as they truly are, from a new perspective.
We embark on a journey from spawning to settlement and growth, a drama that unfolds in a hidden world portrayed masterfully by exquisite imagery on our screens. Time lapse super macro photography takes the viewer into the world of corals and the other tiny organisms that make up coral reef communities.
Following an ancient rhythm and guided by the lunar cycle, many corals spawn on one night of the year in a spectacular display of nature at its finest. The eggs and sperm sacs break open, fertilisation occurs on the surface of the ocean, followed immediately by cell division. Free swimming larvae develop and join the plankton drifting in the ocean currents.
The larvae use their senses to find a suitable place to settle, a substrate of coralline algae with sufficient space to develop and grow. Life covers every surface and in the fierce competition for space an invisible biochemical war ensues. This hostile environment is filled with predators. If a larva manages to survive and find a place to settle, it grows into a juvenile and then an adult which will reproduce asexually to form a colony. These colonies are what we see in glorious vistas of coral reefs from the Great Barrier Reef.
As the colonies grow so do the intricate skeletons of hard corals. These reef building corals are the backbone of coral reef ecosystems.
Corals display remarkable diversity and we can see the polyps in spectacular detail. We see polyps opening and feeding, the prey becoming a predator.
Corals are very vulnerable to changes in ocean temperatures and under stress can bleach and die. Mass bleaching is occurring in the most remote coral reefs in the world and scientists have documented it in reefs worldwide.
Are we witnessing the collapse of marine ecosystems around the globe, an event that will change life in the ocean irreversibly? Will corals be able to survive in this new world?
Corals can be resilient. Scientists have documented corals colonising and growing in cooler areas where they have never been found before. The fossil record tells us that corals are survival experts and have bounced back from extinction events before ………………………… but it took them millions of years to recover.

Joseph Cook is taking a closer look at the microbial life that can be found all over the planet's glaciers and ice sheets. It is increasingly clear that this rich ecosystem affects the melt rates of polar ice and snow and could be accelerating climate change. Narrated by Jim Al-Khalili and starring Chris Hadfield.

In this environmental fairytale, where frogs turn to handsome princes, a "Pizzly Bear" is an actually cross between a Grizzly Bear father and a Polar Bear mother. It addresses how little regard we have for animals other than ourselves.

'The Sweet Stench of Sulfur' blends documentary, historical, and fictional elements by merging mythical and apocalyptic components into what seems like fragments of a dream. It examines human interaction with nature and how nature reclaims itself through natural disasters.
The film was shot at the Dead Sea where sinkholes are 'swallowing' man-made habitats due to evaporation and climate change. Although dangerous and unpredictable, there is beauty in these colorful pools which have been a mysterious source for new microbial life in an ecosystem infamous for its barren characteristics. The voice-over is based on an interview conducted with a geologist who was 'swallowed' by a sinkhole. Trapped inside a liminal space, he underwent psychological extremes from hope to despair. In a post-truth political era, where objective facts about global warming are mythicized, the film reflects on the uncertain through a scientific, metaphysical, and historical lens.

Urges in the undergrowth, erupting fungal fantasies, bursting botanicals; the dust and desires of a tiny alternative universe.
A mixed media, experimental animation imagining attraction and pleasure in insects, and the seduction methods of the plants and fungi that beckon.

Yussuf Mume Saleh journeys nightly into the outskirts of the walled city of Harar to bond with his beloved hyenas, a ritual he has practiced for over thirty-five years. Shot in Black & White, Hairat is a meditation on this uniquely symbiotic relationship between man and wild beast.

A woman takes inspiration from the social lives of ants in a letter to her own estranged sister, and discovers what it takes to survive as a collective. The short animated film "Ant Sisters" draws from scientific research on the evolution of eusociality to weave a tale about the complex dynamics of human and ant sisterhood.

Dealing with what comes naturally isn't easy, especially for animals.
In Animal Behaviour, the latest animated short from the Oscar®-winning team of Alison Snowden and David Fine (Bob's Birthday), five animals meet regularly to discuss their inner angst in a group therapy session led by Dr. Clement, a canine psychotherapist.

Becoming is a short film about the miraculous genesis of animal life. In great microscopic detail, we see the 'making of' an Alpine Newt in its transparent egg from the first cell division to hatching. A single cell is transformed into a complete, complex living organism with a beating heart and running bloodstream.
The first stages of embryonic development are roughly the same for all animals, including humans. In the film, we can observe a universal process which normally is invisible: the very beginning of an animal's life.

Ever wonder what the world might look like beyond the visible light spectrum? Cameras can capture UV and infrared light beyond the ability of the human eye, revealing the secrets of the cosmos and our own macro universe. With amazing visuals and illuminating science "Out of Sight" explores the boundaries of sight and sound to reveal the magic and wonder in the everyday world. Featuring photographer Don Komarechka and Biological Physicist Christopher Bergevin, "Out of Sight" is part of a short digital series of visual explorations titled "Don't Blink".

Wolves From Above is a meditation on a pack of wolves filmed from the air.

A TV presenter tries to engage with crows in the local park. After her first rendezvous with a crow she finds herself unexpectedly emotional. Nevertheless she continuous to meet crows in the park. It seems impossible to establish a relationship between her as a human and the crows.

A Tasmanian tiger wanders around in his zoo enclosure. A glacier is slowly melting. Facing its predicted disappearance, nature exerts its fury, bursts over the frame and resists its extinction by transformation.

An examination of three weeds - coltsfoot, dandelion, and goldenrod and each weed's direct effects on film stock via hand-processing with eco-processing techniques. The film reveals not only the visual characteristic of each plant but also of filmic qualities that each plant imparts on the film stock.

Water, earth, air, fire. And two children at the height of summer.

This stop-motion 16mm film offers an audiovisual meditation on the material animation of stones. The concept is inspired by Camillo Leonardi's "Speculum Lapidum", published in 1533, which describes the magical healing virtues of a variety of stones, categorized by colour. The character-based animated vignettes are inspired by the woodcuts in "De Hortus Sanitatis", a natural history encyclopedia published in 1485, which details various methods of harnessing the power of gems. It was believed at the time that a given gem's powers could be absorbed through focused viewing. Proposing an analogy between this belief and attraction to cinema, this film offers audiences an opportunity to absorb the depicted stones' energies by viewing their images. The title, Somnium Lapidum, or Dream Stones, is a reference to the imaginative content of the "Speculum Lapidum" and the dreamlike experience of cinematic viewership.

In Brazil, where all things are possible, a man takes part in an extraterrestrial phone sex operation.

An interview is conducted exploring methods used to facilitate a real research project whose aim it is to capture and analyze human micro-expressions for use by a variety of industries (including lie detection and entertainment/animation).
But the particular research or the use of human subjects is really just a point of departure. This film takes a moment to touch on our use of technology and vice versa.
The images in the film are created in three ways; 1. by scanning the actor and two other support figures interacting with the scanner glass and each other, one frame at a time 2. By filming the actor revealed by the light of the scanner as he is being scanned. (Each light pass represents a frame of the reanimated scanner image) 3. through line drawings and smears which trace or mark points of contact between the actor and the scanner glass.

A skilled programmer commences work for Galatea, a robotics company launching the next generation of personal companions. Unlike generic robot companions, the C-1000 is made to a client's precise specifications, which either give the companion a unique personality and complex individuality, or replicate those of someone else…
Against the backdrop of activist protests over outsourcing emotional connection, the programmer brings a C-1000 "to life" through trial and error. Using photographs as her guide, she trains the artificial companion to adopt the mannerisms of its original, from the basics, like holding a pen and writing, to advance concepts, like flirtation and passion— the most adept way to flip hair over a shoulder, the perfect amount of time to let eye contact linger when removing a blouse.
The programmer is pleased with her progress, but, despite routine doses of potent memory-suppressants, the programmer cannot repress her recollections of now-gone sweet nothings and tender moments with her lost love.
As the release date approaches, the programmer is confronted with the moral implications of her work, and is forced to choose between maintaining her integrity and protecting her livelihood. r beloved as she begins employment at a controversial tech company specializing in high-end artificial companions.

In this experimental travelogue, efforts to sound human and look natural instead become artificial. The scenery is provided through photo-chromed vintage postcards, displaying not only scenic North American landscapes but also the rise of infrastructure and industry. Aspiring to look more realistic by adding color to a black and white image, the postcards (already a vulnerable method of correspondence caught between private and public) are instead documents of the fantastic. The road trip is narrated by an automated correspondent (all dialogue is taken from spam emails) who is both seductive and mercurial, his entreaties becoming increasingly foreboding and obtuse, in a relentless effort to capture our attentions.

Animated still photographs reveal movement and light on the forest paths that are otherwise invisible to the human eye.

An ugly cat struggles to coexist in a fragmented and broken world, eventually finding a soulmate in a mystical chief. Choreographed in digital simulation errors and inspired by a story found on the internet, this could be the definitive melodrama of our times.

"Phototaxis" draws parallels between Mothman, a prophetic and demonized creature in West Virginia lore, and Narcotics Anonymous, the primary treatment program in West Virginia's addiction epidemic. Rooted in nonfiction, this experimental animated documentary contemplates synchronicity and the role of belief systems in perception and pseudoscience; the tendency to assign supernatural meaning to tragedy and the unknowable; anonymous and apocryphal oral histories; and the moth to the flame. To visualize these narratives, natural materials and pastel-on-paper palimpsest animation are woven together using a multiplane and analogue overhead projection.

An optician's workday is filled by a line of extraordinary customers, who, one by one, use the optical equipments in suspicious ways.

Searchers pursue mysterious and seemingly unreachable objects. And what will happen if they are found?

A man without a memory and a woman whose success hides emptiness grapple with life in dystopian future Warsaw and are drawn into the 20th-century past. But such an escape may not be allowed. A unique love story unfolding under omnipresent crisis and totalitarian oversight, crossing between collapsing near future and Soviet history, The Man with the Magic Box nods to the classic while remaining very much itself. The pleasure of viewing, as much as in the mysterious storyline and strange, perfect performances by the leads, is in the subtle, meticulous detail of the world. Here, people are relentlessly cut off from one another, terrorism is either inescapable or a real-estate development tool, advertising uncomfortably personal, and all aspects of life metered by a credit chip implanted in the hand. At turns bleak, absurd, unsettling, and oddly affecting, the film defies synopsis while advancing with effortless imagination. A future cult favorite in the making.

The Smog blanketed the planet forcing people to live confined. But when you are 15 like Juliette, real life truly begins outside.

An inspired collaboration between filmmakers Peter Mettler (The End of Time) and Emma Davie (I Am Breathing) and radical writer and philosopher David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous), Becoming Animal is an urgent and immersive audiovisual quest, forging a path into the places where humans and other animals meet, where we pry open our senses to witness the so-called natural world—which in turn witnesses us, prompting us to reflect on the very essence of what it means to inhabit our animal bodies.

A meticulous gardener tends to his plastic paradise to the eerie sounds of space.

Around 10 percent of all earthquakes occur in and around Japan, with citizens experiencing as many as 1000 earthquakes per year. For them, preparing for these disasters is a part of daily life, as well as a full-blown industry.

One day the sun turned black. White people must pigment themselves or die. A daughter does. Her father refuses.

The United States were at the brink of the Cold War. Because of their successful nuclear attacks during World War 2, they created the so-called strategy of mutually assured destruction. As part of the so-called strategy of mutually assured destruction, the US produced a list of over 2,000 nuclear targets in the Eastern Bloc, and the information was declassified only a couple of years ago. The list includes military bases and airports, but also targets that would have had an impact on millions of civilians.
Buffer Zone Blues is a short experimental film that visualizes the targets using hypnotic fragments of satellite imagery, formed by processing data from Google Maps API in Python, Nuke, and Unity3D Engine. The imagery creates an immersive, 3-dimensional effect of falling into a 2D plane, aided by the movement of light particles which appear and disappear in a rhythmic way.

Faced with rising sea levels, three New York City neighborhoods are purchased by the government, to be demolished and permanently returned to nature. They are the first communities in the city to undergo a 'managed retreat' from the waterfront, as a response to climate change. Over the course of a year, seasons change, homes are destroyed, and wild animals begin to return, as the coastline of Staten Island is transformed.

As celestial beings descend to Earth vitiating its population, the world's order unbalances. Initiated by these terms, a tragic fall leads to the parturition of crucial opposites: Hell and Heaven's circles.

Adrift follows the story of astronaut Piers Sellers, who accidentally dropped his spatula in space in 2006. His spatula became a deadly piece of space junk, travelling at 17,000 miles per second. The film then journeys across the remote space-junk watching deserts of Chile, shifts to the current threatening skies inhabited by the International Space Station and tracks the crash of a rocket part back to Earth. The film includes narration by Vanguard, voiced by British actress and director Sally Potter.

From the Mongolian steppes to the diplomatic circles of Tokyo, Asia has seen rapid economic and social transformation in the last century. Narration drawn from the writings of a late-19th-century linguist create a provocative sense of contrast against scenes of contemporary life.
Co-Presented with the Margaret Mead Film Festival!