Playlist
The 18th Annual Science New Wave Festival takes place in New York City from October 17-19, 2025. The selected films are in competition for the Science New Wave Luminary Awards.
<p>In a remote area of northern Spain, the wind known as Tramuntana sweeps through landscapes and communities, uprooting trees, boats, clothes, and even lives. Told through lyrical narration and villagers’ stories, the film creates an intimate portrait of this formidable natural force and the landscapes it shapes</p>
<p>Deep furrows in the first light of dawn. Or is it the evening twilight that’s revealing these lunar landscapes that open-pit mining has left behind? On the horizon, the towers of two power plants throw clouds of exhaust fumes into the air while the still active, steel mining giants flash persistently. In the somnambulistic images of the dune-like earth formations, Eginhartz Kanter captures the ambivalent beauty and melancholy of the scenery. The visible effects of the industrial land grab in the coal age testify to a dystopian, man-made emptiness.</p>
<p>The director continues his mission to explore and push the boundaries of our sensory perception in new and surprising ways. In The Electric Kiss algorithmically generated images are harmoniously paired with a tantalising score by Jung An Tagen.</p>
<p>The Call is an eco-revenge film featuring unlikely instigators who were observed and filmed over three years at airports across the United States.</p>
<p>An account of a scientist trying to teach machines how to infer depth from two-dimensional pictures. A parable of a prince trying to resurrect his lover by fashioning a chair out of his lover’s things. A question about the need for human beings, and the things they are in need of.</p>
<p>Scientists and philosophers encounter the limits of their own vision through the eyes of animals.</p>
<p>‘How Now, House?’ investigates our yearning to leave traces behind through the prism of one house in Rotterdam. Using archives, personal memories and the philosophy of time, the film questions whether a space can ever really belong to one person, or time period, at all.</p>
<p>A person is in the flow. They make a decision and keep flowing until all becomes one.</p>
<p>A spectre is haunting the city - a spectre of a cryptic ghost. In the liminal, neglected areas of Ljubljana, lurks the spectre of a striped hyena - a ghost of an animal that fled from the travelling menagerie in 1898. After her escape she managed to lurk around the periphery of the city for several months, scaring and confusing the locals with her presence. In the end, she was shot in the Rašica forest and transformed into an exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Slovenia. Now she stands there, frozen in an awkward pose, small fragile body and glass eyes full of fear with a large bloody bone placed in her mouth by the taxidermist to enhance the animal's perceived ferocity.</p> <p>This eerie spectre, a combination of historical facts and speculative myths, serves as a representation of forgotten futures and lingering histories. While the ghost of the hyena moves through the unsettling, in-between areas of the city—empty malls, deserted underpasses—time starts to come apart at the seams. These spaces, originally designed only as a passage, become places where the distinctions between past, present, and future disappear.</p> <p>The haunting hyena confronts the discomfort as she walks in the unsettling reality of a planet on the verge of environmental catastrophe. While navigating the urban landscape, the hyena merges with ghosts of alternate possibilities. The balance between utopia and dystopia has been disrupted and the once open future has been abandoned and replaced with certainty.</p> <p>The fear of a ghost originates from the unfamiliar, which is necessary for a transformation - a feeling of uncertainty. The future visions it conjures up are not predictions. These possibilities exist to disrupt our complacent dystopia. The future's images are just as influential in shaping the present as the past, with the hyena presence in both. When opening up the future for new stories and agents we can resurrect the ghost into new realities.</p>
<p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">A poetic exploration of three subterranean telescopes in remote regions of Canada, Japan, and Antarctica that reveal a new way of perceiving the universe from within. Underground, we are dreaming into the earth.</p> <p style="margin-left:0px; margin-right:0px">‘Messengers’ was shot in cooperation with the groundbreaking particle physics collaborations SNO+ (Canada), Super Kamiokande (Japan), and IceCube (Antarctica). As each surreal subterranean facility is explored in order of physical size, the film gradually reveals how these environments not only intersect with the natural world, but can also be seen as extensions of the unconscious mind – monuments to our questions about the universe. Following the journey of neutrinos from a black hole, ‘Messengers’ serves as a tactile meditation on human scientific endeavour, the vastness of geologic time, and the shadowy depths of the unconscious.</p>
<p>Valeria works in a nocturnal flower shop where the plants emit eroticism. In her circle of friends, some humans have long, pointed ears, others have wings. Filmmaker Magaly Ugarte de Pablo tells a supernatural tale with roots in the Mexican fantasy tradition and a futuristic gender perspective. A gothic universe of self-discoveries, sexual awakenings and human beings in metamorphosis.</p>
<p>In a near-future world, strangers’ lives intertwine as they grapple with technology’s impact on relationships and identity, exploring profound questions of human connection amidst alienation.</p>
<p>Two scientists from the Technomystic Ecology Lab develop technology that processes the ecological grief contained within a database of audio testimonials. In their lab, located deep inside a cave, they alchemize these feelings into a seed archive for an unknown future.</p>
<p>A moving image and sound portrait of the aura; seizures in focused parts of the brain that result in sensory, physical and emotional disturbances, sometimes acting as warnings for convulsive seizures that may occur. Told through the voices of individuals who experience this phenomena, the film provides an intimate discussion on the different forms of aura experienced, the social stigma around these and the potential positive impact it can make on artistic expression.</p>
<p>Centred on sphagnum moss, Translocations highlights the mutual aid and reciprocal exchange that exists between species in the restoration of a lowland peatbog. Featuring the voice of botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer, and a tactile soundtrack score, the film documents the human and more-than-human life, energies and actions that are transforming an intensively farmed and damaged terrestrial environment back into a flourishing wetland habitat. The film is structured around volunteers moving ('translocating') gathered balls of sphagnum moss from replete to deplete areas of the bog, enabling a keystone species in peat formation and carbon sequestration to thrive and rejuvenate a vital part of the biosphere.</p>
<p>"Sandcastles" parallels two Singapores: one in Southeast Asia, and one buried on the western coast of Michigan. On top of sharing the same name, these two places also share a fraught relationship with sand. Singapore, Michigan was a thriving lumber town in the late 19th century until erosion from mass deforestation caused the sand dunes around it to shift and swallow the town whole. Just as quickly as Singapore, Michigan disappeared under sand, its namesake in the East emerged from it through land reclamation. The film weaves a narrative that intertwines the two Singapores to depict the temporal nature of human edifices built on and destroyed by nothing more than sand.</p>
<p>Experience that transforms the M100 GAV into a large film set for a feature film, where audiences will be able to witness the filming and participate in unexpected ways.</p>
<p>Soil is our closest alien world. STRATA INCOGNITA, is a trans-scalar and trans-temporal journey across the geographies that articulate soil as an agro-industrial infrastructure, but also as an ecosystem and a somatic archive of crimes, memories and myths.</p>
<p>An Atlas of Mineralogy is an illustrated inventory of the inanimate materials that shape the Earth's surface. As James D. Dana observed in Manual of Mineralogy (1857), “The very existence of many of the arts of civilized life depends upon the materials which the rocks afford,” highlighting our enduring fascination with the geological foundations of human culture.</p>
<p>In Excess examines labor, capital, and displacement in modern America through the lens of one city’s trash — in sewers and streets, waterways and workplaces. It’s a gritty dive into the inner workings of a city’s infrastructure that embraces different formats, weaving newly digitized archival material together with surveillance footage and contemporary vignettes of people at work, communities in flux, and waste in motion. Observational, off-beat, and open-ended, the film finds harmonies and dissonance in patterns of creation, consumption, and renewal. (Selected for Jihlava New Visions Forum - U.S. DOCS 2023)</p>
<p>A historic event of sound and light. What is the nature of experiencing global phenomena in today’s interconnected world?</p>
<p><em>A field guide: Flora evolving with environmental changes, and pollinators utilizing biomimicry. Natural objects are gathered, and sculptures of and from the landscape cast reflections of nature being infinite, self-knowing, and alive. Extinct species and stages of evolution are suggested, accompanied by field recordings capturing the underground soundscape of soil. Bird calls and wingbeats offer greetings and warnings. -A rock, a tree, a human—each dissolving into matter and transmuting into new forms.</em></p>
<p>From the Mountain We See the Mountain blends haunting imagery and whispered myth to explore a land marked by ecological trauma and the colonial experience. As animals and humans cautiously re-emerge after a forest fire, rumours swirl: was it an accident, an act of nature, or something more insidious? Through eerie nighttime scenes, surreal lighting and interviews lit by the flicker of imagined flames, the film evokes a sense of environmental dystopia and quiet resistance. Balancing elements of myth, sci-fi and thriller, the film conjures a land reckoning with monsters it did not create.</p>
<p>Soil Story is a 16mm film, combining found foliage and an experimental approach to the film developing process that is in collaboration with the environment. The film explores the juxtaposing histories and memories of the ridgewood reservoir and the cemetery belt. Two locations that straddle each other with the Jackie Robinson parkway cut in between. With both locations in conversation with each other, we explore the cycles of time, space, memory and land development and disposal.</p>
<p>Glittering illusions of vectorized providence attempt to emulate an inherited physical realm of diminishing significance.</p>
<p>In a world where ex-partners have to swap a chosen body part after breaking up, someone rediscovers their former ear on someone else. A journey towards self-acceptance begins.</p>
<p>Previously unheard voices are manifest on recordings. Extinct flora/fauna provide raw materials for magnetic video/audio-tape. Media archaeology reveals deeper content.</p>
<p>Witness: An Organima Film' is an experimental animation short film that captures the sentience in small life-forms: ancient beings on stone, an intelligent water droplet, and spirits of sunlight. Crafted with a novel animation approach that asks natural materials to guide their own story, elemental archives move the viewer to question the nature of human purpose and renew their child-like vision.</p>
<p>Between There and Here focuses on researchers who study Icelandic hot springs as an analogue to geothermal locations on Mars as they might have been millions of years ago.</p>
<p>What if the rock could be a lens? And if it’s not a question of if, but when? Braided Sand considers the geologic materiality of imaging and communication technologies. There is no glass lens without sand, which itself is the result of millions of years of geologic activity. Filmed at a sand mine, a glass factory and a nanotech laboratory, Braided Sand moves between observation and abstraction, juxtaposing human and geologic timescales, plunging the viewer into churning industrial environments to lay bare the weighty earthly bases of seemingly invisible and immaterial infrastructures.</p>
<p>Set within a day’s natural cycle in a sentient forest, a deeper interconnectedness is threatened by an external force when darkness falls. Through shifting perspectives viewers are invited on a sensory journey bridging science and poetry, inspired by scientific papers on mother trees by professor Suzanne Simard.</p>
<p>A fictional mythological movie about the birth and death of our planet. The movie shows things happening on the planet through the eyes of two naive god figures; a wild girl who has the power of creation, and a shy boy who has the power of destruction. This is not a fight between “bad” and “good”, but a game between two equal parts to find harmony, which seems to work well until a new issue enters the story: the human race.</p>
<p>Nemo is the name of the famous captain in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, named by Jules Verne after the latin word meaning "no one, nobody". On the shores of Chittagong, Bangladesh, the cargo ship NEMO 1 is beached amongst hundreds of others. A journey towards steel giants being recycled by minuscule men.</p>
<p>In this immersive sonic and visual experience, centered around the return of the American Great Eastern Brood X cicadas, a long distance conversation between two friends becomes the lifeline of an unfinished film. Measuring time through the cicadas' return provides a pulse for a post-pandemic moment in US history and invokes a reflection of our collective futures. A cacophony of human and non-human voices builds, highlighting the power of nature as it interweaves socio-political narratives and ecological cycles. Caution: Film contains strobing lights.</p>
<p>a lifetime of surgeries continues with an upgrade in battery life and a downgrade in scar tissue when the filmmaker has his original pacemaker replaced after sixteen years.</p>
<p>Disembodied movie fragments mutate into a lurid looping graphical landscape where captive movie actors witness the ensuing disorder as they descend into a celluloid maelstrom.</p>
<p>“Liquid crystal has seeped everywhere and it has hardened into forms that have made themselves indispensable to modern life. This liquid crystal phase can form itself into any form,” writes Esther Leslie in her book Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form. Inspired by her theories on liquid crystals and their penetration into our everyday world, into screens, computers and mobile devices, liquid crystals are today not only the key to images, but also to perception and our view of the world.</p>
<p>In OBSERVER, filmmaker Ian Cheney embarks on an experiment in which he brings a series of keen-eyed observers - scientists, artists, a hunter - to a range of locations around the world, often without telling them where they are going, and asks them simply to describe what they see. What unfolds is a deep exploration and celebration of the power of observation: what happens when you find new ways to sense and perceive the world around you? With customary whimsy and a small painted red square that Cheney brings on every journey, the film is an invitation to viewers to find beauty and meaning in even the most quotidian of locales.</p>
<p dir="ltr">In 1982, six rural communities across the United States were notified that all of the nation’s nuclear waste might be buried beneath them forever. Each candidate site was studied in detail by the Department of Energy’s scientists and bureaucrats, in a process met with distress and resistance. A compelling indictment that interweaves physics, geology and democracy.</p>