Playlist
The 19th Annual Science New Wave Festival takes place October 16–23, 2026, with all 64 selected films streaming on Labocine. The films will compete for the Science New Wave Luminary Awards.
64 films of “endless forms most beautiful”—one for each of the 64 codons in the genetic code.
Presented by Labocine, the Science New Wave Festival is an annual celebration of science cinema. Each edition showcases the latest films from around the world—works that boldly experiment with form and style, redefining how science is seen and told on screen.
Espelie's poetic, nonfiction feature engages with scientific research—continuing her blend of experimental storytelling and science that began with earlier shorts and her 2014 feature The Lanthanide Series
Béni is the name of a ten-year-old girl from my neighborhood. It is summer, and she is not going on vacation. She collects sounds in space. According to Doreen Massey, space is the sphere of the possibility of the existence of plurality, of the coexistence of difference. It is the sphere of the possibility of the existence of more-than-one—just as film has the potential to create constellations and connect differences with one another.
Hovering between the real and the imagined, a filmmaker traces their fragmented sense of place. Moving through maps, projections, digital simulations, they explore how ways of seeing shape how we belong. A search for position that is never fixed, but always felt in relation. As far as we imagine is a journey and meditation on placelessness, image-making, perspective and the quiet politics of how we relate to our surroundings.
As urbanisation and fires close in on Bolivia's forests, a former orphan turned animal caretaker finds himself at a crossroads. While working to secure a new home for the monkeys at the sanctuary founded by his adoptive mother, his desire to complete his veterinary studies pulls him toward a life beyond it. Caught between devotion and independence, his journey becomes an intimate exploration of care, captivity and freedom for both wildlife and himself.
This film traces Arizona's desert as it is reshaped into a hub for data centres and semiconductor manufacturing. Moving through altered waterways, the film exposes tensions between technoutopian visions and drought-stricken ecologies. Guided by offscreen voices and Tohono O'odham poet Ofelia Zepeda's 'Cloud Song', ancestral knowledge counters the rise of industrial 'cloud' infrastructures.
Women pretend to be rocks. Military operations masquerade as art education. One woman deserts to pursue a more radical act of unselfing.
The green ones share stories of change in this travelogue from the vantage point of plants. In a canyon where all things move, these ancient beings urge humanity to reconsider acts of interspecies and intraspecies relation during a current period of intense anthropogenic climate change.
A filmmaker uses Super 8 film to come to terms with his diagnosis of Young Onset Parkinson's Disease.
In the Sibundoy Valley, Mercedes Cuatindioy cultivates her chagra as an act of resistance and remembrance. Between seeds and polyculture practices, her life embodies the transmission of Indigenous knowledge threatened by oblivion.
Four young researchers in Big Sky Country begin to wonder about the vastness of the world and greater cosmos. If non-human presences were capable of harboring intelligence and communicating, what information could they pass along? Using the trees and wind as messengers, the researchers record and decipher writings and recordings from the trees and wind, relating them back to the land and universe, before finding ways to embody them through sound and movement as a form of empathy and communion with a greater intelligence.
A family of wild owls hunts, feeds, and raises their young. A camera in their nest captures every move. While online viewers monitor the owls 24/7, nature begins to defy its audience's expectations.
Pseudomorphs is a film about cephalopods, doubling bodies, institutional friction, hypnosis and disappearance. It is staged across three locations: a marine biology laboratory studying cephalopod cognition and skin camouflage; a beach home to giant ammonite fossils; and the mesopelagic zone of the sea. The film takes the pseudomorph as its starting point - a decoy ink body created by cuttlefish, squid and octopuses - to think through disparate instances where the body's boundary against the world becomes unstable and altered. It is narrated through multiple, nested voices: email correspondence, interview fragments and a bookending exercise to facilitate out-of-body experiences.
From Something to Nothing is an experimental cinematic portrait of a forest in Upper Austria shortly before its destruction. Through thousands of photographs of individual tree barks, the disappearing forest is transformed into hypnotic frame-by-frame animations, abstract visual loops, and immersive streams of colour and texture. As the forest gradually dissolves into movement and memory, the film explores ecological loss, perception, and the fragile relationship between humans and the natural world.
Drawing from a constellation of highly textured analogue images and a rich tapestry of soothing sound, Orbits journeys into the sensorial depths of Marie-Christine's memory, after losing her sight some years ago.
In a cave situated between the ridges of the fingerprints of a human being, a primordial encounter with matter, light and sound unfolds. The Katabasis, the western mythological descent to the underworld, is here stripped of its mythical connotations to reveal only its narrative function, the confrontation with the past and with what has been lost.
Portrait of an urban marsh born from a human flaw, where life invents new forms of coexistence.
Shot on Super 8, the film captures a walk around a precarious, low-lying sandbank island, where fleeting observations come into focus only to vanish again. Rotations and cycles ebb and flow through manmade wind vanes assembled from foraged sea drift, while sea-worn objects hint at deeper meanings beneath the surface. Prehistoric-looking cacti punctuate the island, contributing to its strange, otherworldly atmosphere.
In this collaboration between Deborah S. Phillips, seasoned 16mm filmmaker, and Zuzanna Marczak, who encounters the medium with a fresh perspective, fragments and impressions of urban debris come alive through playful stop-motion and superimpositions. Scraps, ribbons, caps, paper, plastic, cans and objects beyond identification lie scattered beneath the bridges and along the streets. A multi-lingual meditation on the poetry of waste.
Welcome to Set invites you behind the scenes of machine learning, where data becomes drama. This experimental documentary explores how emotion, suspicion, and politics intertwine within the algorithmic practices of security.
A few seeds preserved in Madrid's Botanical Gardens are sent back to the south coast of Peru, where they were collected centuries ago. A sensual imaginary journey, a counter-narrative to colonial despoilment.
When you watch a particle it acts like a particle. But when you look away, it does a whole other thing. This story explores modes of experiencing the strange quantum basis of an everyday life. It journeys through split déja-vu, Schrödinger's hamster and the clouds of possibilities that are hiding just beyond our reach. This is a documentary about the fabric of reality in which Anne Jeppesen, like a silent observer, rewatches all the ways in which we humans make sense of the world.
The Boys and the Bees follows a year in the life of a Black family on a small farm in rural Georgia. Through a patient, verité lens, the film moves at the pace of two young boys, alive with curiosity, as they wander fields, tend hives, and grow in their relationship with the land around them. Their parents, Eliza and Nehemiah Ray—partners in life, parenthood, and beekeeping—set out to reimagine Black family life, rooting it in the wisdom of the natural world. As they work toward restoring their homestead, the film traces their quiet efforts to raise their sons, Carver (6) and Aaro (4), close to the land, transforming the rhythms of daily life into a tender meditation on childhood, inheritance, and legacy. From small, luminous moments—a frightened boy finding the courage to tend a beehive—a larger story unfolds: one of reparative healing and the deliberate work of building a family bound to the land. The Boys and the Bees is a tender yet radical portrait of self-determination, kinship, and love.
A coastal sand dune is transformed and reshaped into digital ether. The film focuses closely on sand as a material, which is composed of silica, the mineral that is a primary ingredient in manufacturing silicon chips, lenses, binoculars, microscopes and mirrors - devices that extend our vision. The film uses these devices to visually capture the sand dune and evoke the transformation of materials that goes into their production. Through 16mm analog techniques, elemental forces of a sand dune merge with the physical properties of the celluloid. Dune 'flow attachment' is the point on the downwind side of a sand dune where the wind, which has been separated from the dune crest, re-establishes contact with the dune surface. This aerodynamic phenomenon is a critical component of how dunes grow and migrate.
Set along the coast of Virginia and Maryland's barrier islands and NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, machines, humans, and non-human organisms interact with each other. In a region where encountering rocket launches and wild horses is typical for a local resident, Habitation provides a meditation on the island chain's terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial ecosystems to explore the interconnectedness of humans and the environment. Ecological crisis, space colonization, geology, and time intersect on micro and macro scales.
An Uncertain Eternity follows the journey of icebergs that travel from Ilulissat Icefjord in Greenland to the East coast of Newfoundland in Canada. Narrated by Greenlanders and Newfoundlanders, this film explores the political, social, and spiritual implications of the icebergs and how they are changing as the planet warms.
While studying abroad, a daughter recalls the magical herbal remedies her mother used to brew when she was young, drifting into a maze of memories across the glitches of a video call.
A soul waits to be reincarnated while reflecting back on her past life as a nun, who worked at the Vatican Astronomical Observatory in early-20th century. There, she took part in the "Carte du Ciel" — an ambitious international project to map the night sky, earning the early title of "computer" as a result of processing repetitive calculations. Disillusioned with her previous existence, she considers becoming a coder in her next life, amidst the wave of economic optimism awaiting her reincarnation in 1990s Portugal. Shot in 16mm film and smartphone, "Oh Be a Fine Girl Kiss Me" blends historical fiction and autobiography in a meditation on life's choices and constraints, as well as on the systems and categories that shaped modernity.
A personal documentary with space age flair which follows a filmmaker as he traverses the globe, and even the galaxy, trying to comprehend the elusive figure of his late grandfather, a pioneering neurobiologist of smell with whom he always sensed an affinity.
Mythical like a dragon, but also real, we grew attached to ideas of what a dinosaur could have been. A gentle touch in a clay layer uncovers fossilised bones, the physical remains of what is left of the creatures that spark our imaginations are met with tenderness. 'You don't love me, you love the idea of me', says the t-rex. A team of VUB researchers set out to find definite proof of what caused the end of the dinosaur era. One fine line in the rockbed holds knowledge to the minute, of that fateful day, 66 million years ago. This is not an impossible love story, it's a true crime, set in deep time.
Filmmaker Katy Scoggin is starting a project about evolution and geologic time, but disagreements with her father — a young-earth creationist who rejects the theory of evolution — keep getting in the way. She heads home, where he is completing his last year of teaching before moving with the family across the country. Filming him in the classroom, where he is loved and respected, she begins to see him more fully, even as tensions at home reach a boiling point. With clarity and wry humor, Flood captures the complexity of a family that is both tightly knit and deeply divided.
The search for La Flor de Irupé, a lost film by Guillermo Zúñiga, a Spanish pioneer of scientific filmmaking who was exiled in Argentina after the Spanish Civil War, triggers a journey into family histories and national archives. As we witness the slow growth of the yrupé plant, images and silences emerge, revealing layers of historical concealment and censorship.
Shot on 16mm film using a handcrafted Time-Slice camera with 293 lenses—a modern reinterpretation of the original device built by Tim Macmillan in the early 1980s—toward a fundamental theory of physics offers a unique, tactile exploration of time and light as the raw materials and fundamental paradoxes of cinema.
Plant matter is used to create finely detailed indexical traces on photochemical film. The traces are not only visible but also audible. By feeding botanical textures, patterns and rhythms into the optical sound system noise, cracks, pops and hiss is generated. Seeing is hearing. Such a cross modality disobeys the usual lipsync illusion and replaces this so called realism with a radically different concreteness. Phytophonics is serious play with living material in a world that is increasingly based on simulated sham. Eco-punk against the abyss created by late-capitalism.
Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association, the frictions that give way to fracture. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time.
Who would have interest in taking the side of the wild boar? 1525 : in a forest in the Cévennes in France, peasant women from many regions band together to fight the enclosure of common lands. A few centuries later, construction in the forest is under the watchful eye of Annie, a solitary 75-year-old night watchwoman. One night, the landscape is turned upside down.
In the heart of the Alta Guajira, 15-year-old Weinshi, a girl from the Wayuu people whose name means "Time", begins to hear an ancestral calling in her dreams: the earth must be healed through her people's sacred dance, the Yonna.
As we stand at the brink of a sixth extinction caused by human activity, countless species are adapting swiftly, thriving in our shadow and foretelling the ecologies of the future. The Inheritors is guided by one such species, the ring-billed gull, in an exploration of our shared world. Each spring, tens of thousands of these gulls migrate to a small island in the Saint Lawrence River near Montreal to nest alongside Canada's largest landfill, an essential source of food for their young. Tracing a full reproductive season, the film offers an arrestingly intimate observation of the colony's social organization, emotional life and daily rituals in an increasingly inhospitable ecosystem. Alternating between the perspectives of prey and predator, we follow the gulls as they become the targets of invasive data collection, then of harsh deterrence measures using the age-old art of falconry. For these unwanted creatures, threats arrive from both land and air in the form of flesh, feather and metal. With a soundtrack that lets the voices of the birds speak for themselves and cinematography that prioritizes their gaze, The Inheritors is a sensory experience which invites us to contemplate new ways of living and dying on a planet haunted by mass consumption and pollution.
In Fort Bragg, California, a former town dump that operated until the 1960s has become famed for its glistening coastline, scattered with thousands of pieces of colorful sea glass. For decades, the waves at Glass Beach have eroded shards of broken glass into smooth pebbles, transforming the landscape by turning trash into jewel-like forms. We Could Have Never Met is a meditation on chance encounters, guided (in part) by Captain Cass Forrington – a former sea captain who runs the International Sea Glass Museum. What started as an exploration of sea glass soon transformed into a love letter to the chance encounter. The film pays homage to the power of turning trash into treasure, and our collective ability to move through hard times and come out the other side.
Artefacts of Accumulation voyages into the depths of the transformation process of discarded matter. The short documentary gazes at the operations that domestic and industrial waste undertake in the process of being recycled and deposited. Immersing in the technologies that define the procedures of dealing with refuse, the film reveals the architectures that orbit the worlds our waste creates.
Preston and Adam work together to deepen and share their know-how about living in a harsh northern climate. In a geodesic dome, they grow food that they offer directly to their community, while teaching the members food self-sufficiency.
"When I was a child, I didn't know I was living during a mass extinction." – Marcel Barelli. Inspired by cine-tracts from the 1960s and animated with water, the film is a reflection on our memory and the ongoing extinction.
June 1971 - in a fluid landscape completely below sea level, a young biology student dies during the last year of his studies, leaving behind an unfinished scientific collection. More than fifty years later, a group of ecologists and volunteers are trying to understand and document the same environment as it is today.
A sensorial attunement of the layered mysteries of oceanic zones oscillating between positive and negative 16mm black-and-white film. Abstracted studies and sonic traces of communicating species dwelling in the intertidal and midnight zones of the Pacific Ocean.
meteors… is a silent found footage film composed of images from the Katsakh Mediterranean archive collection—a personal collection of non-fiction Super 8mm and 16mm films capturing cities and villages of the Eastern Mediterranean from the 1920s to the 1980s, initiated in 2020 by Chantal Partamian, an experimental filmmaker and archivist. Between images and words, a poetic exchange traces the paths of exile, and imprints the landscapes of here and elsewhere with a history laden with memory and mourning.
Follow herons, finches, and snow geese through hazy marshes and moonlit forests to trace the footsteps of renowned abolitionist Harriet Tubman and explore what it means for us to physically dwell with the ghosts of America's past. Traveling along the Harriet Tubman historical byway, Ghost Lands reflects on the natural and unnatural landscapes Tubman would have encountered on the Delmarva Peninsula and considers how visiting these spaces informs our understanding of shared history.
Environmental toxicologists on the California coast find dangerously high levels of mercury in local mountain lions. A hunt through the food web for the source of the mercury reveals a story of global pollution and the permeability of our shared environment.
Deep in Mexico's forests, this immersive sci-fi doc follows the unusual, fungi-driven paths of two Indigenous mycologists as they seek to reconcile the past and present while reimagining the future for themselves and the changing world they inhabit.
As the steelworks in Port Talbot, south Wales, fall silent, immersive listening walks connect men with nature, memory and mental health in a new way. 'A Spider's Lunch & Other Sounds' is a listening film; part documentary, part sonic experience.
Winter of Machines juxtaposes the post-industrial landscape of Charleroi with the legacy of Futurism. Fascinated by Fernand Steven's mural Evocation de la chimie (1936–1938) in the Lycée Léonie de Waha in Liège, which celebrates science, industry and progress, Jan Locus examines the stark contrast between this utopian vision and Charleroi's present struggles with poverty and unemployment. The film alternates between images of present-day Charleroi - factories, warehouses and relics of its industrial past - and the promise embedded in Steven's mural. Time seems suspended through a restrained montage of static, grey-toned shots devoid of human presence. The haunting soundtrack by sound artist Els Viaene further contributes to this almost ghostly atmosphere. Have the avant-garde and the industrial age failed in their promise of progress? Or are new upheavals still to come? Locus refuses to take sides, and Winter of Machines consequently breathes both a disquieting melancholy and a buoyant sense of anticipation.
The Atom's Tale is a science-fiction short film that follows the speculative journey of a single atom as it moves through geological, biological, and technological realms. Combining animation, documentary, and scripted scenes, the film traces the atom's passage through matter, life, and media. The story begins with an atom embedded in stone, until a plant root dislodges it and releases it into the living world. After passing through various biological forms, it settles on the ocean floor where, over millions of years, it becomes part of petroleum. This material is later refined and transformed into a screen. When the screen is eventually discarded, it is recovered from a waste site and repurposed into a speculative device that listens to vibrations in spider webs. Moving between deep time and imagined futures, The Atom's Tale explores the circulation of matter, the geological origins of technology, and our entanglement with more-than-human worlds.
Gamespace becomes a therapeutic alternate reality in And If the Body, which examines the clinical use of technologies such as VR & electrical stimulation in the treatment of spinal cord injury & other neuromuscular disorders. In this strange new world of neurotechnology, the physical & the virtual begin to blur. A meditation on the disrupted body, & its re-enchantment.
In a spa surrounded by mountains of salt, guests relax and sunbathe, while workers collect the glowing crystals under the sun. Children run off, escaping the watchful eyes of adults, and a woman drifts through this landscape in a haze, detached from reality. As night falls, the space transforms, shaped by the desires of those who pass through.
8.75mm film - a celluloid format unique to China and never circulated elsewhere, was a film format where no camera was made for. This print film stock was primarily used for mobile projection units to exhibit films in countryside, mountains, islands and ethnic minority regions in China from the 60s to 80s. 'What is a film without a camera?', a question that emerged from the research, was explored by the artist through DIY printing and different photochemical processes. Images of film strips burn, blur, and tear within the chromatic space, the fleeting frames of archival films overlap with the super 8 camera footage shot by the artist. These interlayered images coalesce with optical sound and narratives from unnamed interlocutors, weaving together fragmented stories of an audience, a film factory and a camera inventor, where facts are immaterial, and memories are evanescent. Within the abstractions, the images and sounds of resistance are folded into the tales of the cinematic invention. Reimagining a format that once resisted circulation, as a medium through which other forms of affect and dissenting hearsay continue to ripple.
A burned forest and the butterflies that signal its recovery. The mourning for my father and the absences intertwined with what remains, like a note from his trumpet. Collections, images, and sounds that are inherited. Letters written by birds that used to visit me as a child and now perch on our balcony, in the same trees that survived the fire. Those birds whisper secrets to my son Simón, as I watch him grow. The love story of my grandmother and her lover, the music he dedicated to her. Her books, and my photography book with pictures I took on a trip two weeks after my father's death. The journeys, the shifting sense of home, exile and transplants. Ashes that are also compost, and metamorphoses that also carry violence, decomposition. The intimacy of a present that, though marked by the past, sketches a becoming.
Now in his sixth decade and living on the outskirts of London in near-poverty on benefits and the products of his imagination, the supernaturally-inclined English writer Quentin S. Crisp (not to be confused with the other Quentin Crisp, author of The Naked Civil Servant) contemplates the value of living a creative life such as his. As chronic austerity makes security increasingly elusive, and without the assurances of fame, posterity, or financial stability - a condition shared by many - he begins to sense his life and writing edging toward material disappearance. Duckweed (根無し草) adopts the form of the literary zuihitsu, a style of Japanese literature dating back to the Heian period, where one ''follows the brush''. This feature-length supernatural film-essay is structured around readings of Crisp's own zuihitsu of the same name, which, in essence, is the story of his life.
A truly eccentric and original voice in contemporary fiction, Crisp's body of literary work spans the Japanese I-novel, tanka poetry, memoir, and supernatural and horror fiction, influenced in equal measure by such writers as H.P. Lovecraft, Yukio Mishima and Nagai Kafū. His published works include Shrike (2009) 'Remember You're a One-Ball!' (2010), Erith (2015), Blue on Blue (2015), Aiaigasa (2018), Graves (2019), Hamster Dam (2021), Binturong Time (2022), Ikaho (2023) and I Reign in Hell (2024), The Hermitage (2026).
Flowers flicker along a 16mm strip, just before or right after the flames. You can hear them weep, scream, and resist. In response to this stridency, there is the burst of light from a black petal. Working from scientific audio recording, the film is designed as an act of appropriation and resistance, refusing to let flowers burn.
A Sense of Limit is an artistic essay film shot solely on Super8 which invites viewers to imagine the world as seen, heard and felt by other beings. Through philosophical narration, montage of natural imagery and immersive sound design, the film challenges us to recognise the limits of our own perception and find space for humility, curiosity and empathy for all life on earth.
A Circle as the Center of the Whole approaches the city of Delhi as a site excavated by history, ideology, and the act of remembrance itself. Fragments from state records, mythic narratives, and personal memory construct a speculative archive that disrupts any attempts at fixing the city's identity as a monolith. The figure of a demolished mosque looms over a present-day excavation, as a childhood encounter with loss takes the shape of a hole in the ground. Archaeology functions as both method and metaphor, through which the film examines cycles of discovery and erasure implicit in personal and political claims over the city, reimagining its terrain through detours. What emerges is an alternate historiography marked by ruptures, which ask how absence comes to organize memory and space.
In the desert of the American southwest, scientists are simulating the colonisation of Mars. They follow protocols, record data and live according to precise schedules. During their breaks, day-to-day life takes on the appearance of a strange science fiction. How do we imagine life on a planet we've never set foot on?
The filmmaker writes a letter to her cat, Henry. She is looking for a soft and tender place to inhabit – a quiet refuge of warmth to retreat into when the world becomes too loud. An ode to our captive pets and the intimate worlds we build together.
A handmade sculptural collage assembled from found footage, bodily residue, and chemical abrasion. Tape, ink, skin, semen, and corrosive processes accumulate across deteriorating 16mm film until the image itself begins to dissolve. What remains is a volatile archive of memory, intimacy, and physical decay, a work that continues to mutate beyond its own making, treating film not as a finished object but as a living material.
Level is a poetic and reflective documentary exploring landscapes that are irrevocably changing due to climate change. Told through personal experience, it weaves the mourning of a lost father and the arrival of a new child across two contrasting European landscapes: the flat, sea-threatened fields of Usquert in the Netherlands and the mountainous, rugged terrain of Miera in northern Spain. Through image, sound, voice, and memory, the film meditates on grief, renewal, and human entanglement with ecological and geological time.
The Colorado River is drying up. Reservoirs are falling to record lows and drought continues to ravage the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. The heavily engineered water systems of the American Southwest buckle under the strain of an expanding population. Life for those on the fringes begins to unravel.
Chiaroscuro is an experimental documentary essay that starts with the discovery of Rodolfo Galeazzi's vast artistic archive. From this an intimate journey connects memory, heritage, and the connection with the dead, building a bridge between past and present, in dialogue with luminaries and dreams.
How can we break through our constitutive silences?
Is it only today that we can truly (re)know and recognize one another?
Can the sky serve as a guide and a map for finding one another today?
Can art and the language of dreams be vehicles for connection?