Playlist
The 19th Annual Science New Wave Festival takes place in New York City from October 16-23, 2026. The selected films are in competition for the Science New Wave Luminary Awards.
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.
Between reality and imagination, science and sensations, Raouf Moussa explores his sense of belonging, inscribed in a fragmented cultural no-man's land. How can one belong to a landscape when the horizon is never attainable and always receding? A unique and personal documentary essay exploring fields and representations, maps and territories.
As fires and urbanisation threaten Bolivia's forests, a former orphan turned animal caretaker navigates between relocating his adoptive mother's monkey sanctuary and pursuing his own veterinary studies, grappling with the delicate balance between care, confinement and freedom, both for humans and wildlife.
Tracing Arizona's landscape from a self-driving car, the film explores the desert's transformation into a hub for AI and semiconductor production. It reveals the tension between techno-utopian promises and the ecological realities of a drought-ridden terrain. Guided by the Cloud Song of Tohono O'odham poet Ofelia Zepeda, the narrative offers an ancestral countercurrent to the expanding physical infrastructure of industrial cloud computing.
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 anthropogenic climate change.
A filmmaker documents his early-onset Parkinson's diagnosis using image, memory, and texture to navigate illness, identity, and acceptance.
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 experiences the springtime: hunting, feeding, raising their young. A camera in their nest captures their every move. While a community of online viewers monitor the owls 24/7 via livestream, a strange story begins to unfold, calling into question the paradigm of control that underpins our human interventions into the non-human realm.
Pseudomorphs (2026) 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 voices: email correspondence, interview fragments, and a bookending exercise to facilitate out-of-body experiences.
"From Something to Nothing" is a cinematic portrait of a forest in Ehrenfeld (Upper Austria) that was cleared in 2021—one of the region's largest forest destruction projects. More than 3,000 photographic images of the unique bark patterns of the trees—later destroyed—form the raw material. Through frame-by-frame animation, abstract, flowing loops emerged that create a trance-like effect and allow the forest to "speak" visually.
It was essential to me to avoid conventional narrative and representational forms. Instead of a documentary-realistic approach, I chose an abstract visual language that does not aim for recognizability or the delivery of facts, but for perception, disruption, and emotional resonance. The goal was to create an experiential space from which new perspectives on the relationship between humans, the environment, and loss can emerge.
Marie-Christine, who lost her sight some years ago, explores life in a strikingly sensory way: through her fingertips. Her personal experiences arouse in her son a curiosity and sense of wonder about the beauty of the universe. Drawing from a constellation of highly textured analogue images, alongside a rich tapestry of sound, Orbits journeys into the sensorial depths of Marie-Christine's memory, pondering the essence of love and legacy.
In a cave situated between the ridges of a human fingerprint, a primordial encounter with matter, light and sound unfolds.
Filmed in 16 mm at the Wiels Marsh in Brussels. A marsh that emerged after the water table was disrupted during excavation work for a real estate project. Insects, birds, and humans coexist in this refuge, where life and magic seem to resist.
Tessa Garland – Drift (2025)
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.
An exploration of the everyday mysteries of quantum mechanics, in which the state of particles is only certain when observed, and split déjà vus imply parallel realities.
On an idyllic farm in rural Georgia, beekeeping parents tenderly share their knowledge of life, love, and nature with their young sons while restoring their homestead.
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.
Set along the coast of Virginia's Eastern Shore 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 ponies 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.
At the end of the 19th century, the Vatican summoned four nuns to map a portion of the sky for the ambitious Map of the Heavens project: the nuns thus became 'computers.; Narrated from the point of view of a nun's soul in transit before reincarnation, Oh Be a Fine Girl Kiss Me intertwines history and fiction in a playful account about female perspective and self-determination.
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.
Miriam is an unemployed journalist who has a beat on a story that could turn her bad luck around. Her dad is an evangelical who believes the fossil record derived from Noah's Flood. For ten years, he has lived in the Mojave Desert running a paleontology museum. Miriam ventures west to interview him about what made him a creationist.
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.
Dizzying, otherworldly, and truly experimental, toward a fundamental theory of physics deploys a reconstruction of the Time-Slice camera, a circular rig invented by cinematographer Tim MacMillan, that uses 293 lenses shooting simultaneously to capture different points of view in 16mm. Recalling Eadweard Muybridge's protocinematic experiments in capturing movement, as well as the abstract lichtspiel of intermedia artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, Thomas Wilfred, and Jim Davis, Victor Van Rossem's 3D film captures three-dimensional light-objects that are at once spectral and tangibly present, a ballet of abstract radiance and undulant color.
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, and the frictions that give way to fracture. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time.
In the 16th century, 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.
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.
The Inheritors offers an intimately arresting observation of the daily life of a colony of ring-billed gulls which nest alongside Canada's largest landfill to feed their young. Alternating between the perspectives of prey and predator, we follow these unwanted creatures through a full breeding season as they become the targets of invasive data collection, then of harsh deterrence measures using the age-old art of falconry. With sound and cinematography that lets the birds speak for themselves, 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. A foretelling of the ecologies of our future.
Glass Beach, located in Fort Bragg, California, is a world-renowned coastal destination famous for its shores covered in millions of tiny, smooth, colorful pieces of sea glass. Once a 20th-century municipal dump site, its turned into a beautiful place of discovery. This short piece is a love story at its core...an ode to the chance encounter of discovery...of love. But it is also about the cosmos. And we see that angle through the eyes and words of a former sea captain, who now runs a Sea Glass Museum where he too connects the act of discovery with something cosmic.
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.
In Chisasibi's harsh northern climate, where each season brings new challenges, Preston Sam and Adam Koperqualuk are redefining what's possible in food sovereignty. Working within a geodesic dome, they grow farm‑to‑table produce for their community and teach others how to cultivate resilience through sustainable, home‑grown food. Their journey, deeply rooted in community, tradition, and innovation, reflects a collective commitment to reclaim knowledge, foster self‑reliance, and build a sustainable future even in the face of adversity — showing that growth can flourish even in the coldest of soils.
"When I was a child, I didn't know I was living during a mass extinction." Inspired by cine-tracts from the 1960s and animated with water, Ex-tract 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. Biosonar clicks of whales and vocalizations of seals are interrupted by the sounds of tanker engines, radar pings from commercial and military ships, and the growing chorus of ocean mining. Amid the din, coral forms bleach from rising carbonic acid levels, ghostly reminders of changing ecosystems.
Notes:
Organized Forgetting contains studies of erosion, sea urchins, a newly discovered species of Siphonophore, coral, coral bleaching, and the noise pollution affecting whale and seal communication. There are some exceptional sound artists featured in this film. The first one you will hear is Yoichi Kamimura, who records the sounds of ice flows in the Pacific Ocean in Hokkaido, Japan. In his recording, you will hear the ice shelf moan and whistle with escaping oxygen, and you will hear seals under the ice sheets communicating to each other. You will also hear hydrophone recordings by Pablo Diserens where he honed in on sea urchin communication and other tide pool dwellers. The remainder of the sound you will hear is of two competing sets of sounds. Whale communication and the sounds of container ships, radar pings from military and commercial vessels, and ocean mining. With the whales, you will hear some distinct vocalizations, Low-frequency D calls that have an intense vibrational quality, and biosonar clicks where each click echoing back is where distance and direction are discerned from fast-moving fish to catch and eat, and to avoid the hulls of approaching ships. Light does not travel well under the ocean. Sound travels four times faster in water than in air, and in the deep, whales can communicate with each other from hundreds of miles away. They are acoustically oriented and are finely tuned to the sonic environment of the ocean. Their consciousness and sense of self is based on sound, not sight. I learned that whale pods have their own unique dialect of calls that calves learn from their mothers over several years. This indicates complex cultural communication in the animal world.
A way to better understand our rapidly changing climate is through sound. The hope is for a recalibration of the senses to pick up subtle changes in light and texture, to listen attentively for sounds that can draw us closer to wonder and curiosity, and to allow the sonic vibrations of communicating species to deepen appreciation and interconnectedness.
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 central coast of California find dangerously high levels of mercury in the terrestrial food web. Following the mercury from mountain lions at the top of the food chain down to deer and lichen, they realize the toxin is coming from the fog—a beloved icon of California.
Daughters of the Forest is a story of entanglements: between humans and mushrooms; the visible and the invisible; generational knowledge and modern science. This sci-fi documentary invites us to reconsider the experiences of both human and non-human inhabitants of our world. We follow Lis and Juli, two young scientists from indigenous communities that have long lived in symbiosis with the many mushrooms in their regions. The world they know is changing, and their pursuits are threatened by deforestation, lack of opportunity, and loss. Still, they share how mushrooms show us different possibilities of coexistence, helping them overcome obstacles to reshape their lives and futures.
Brief Synopsis:
Set in Port Talbot, south Wales, as the steelworks fall silent, A Spider's Lunch & Other Sounds follows local men's walk-and-talk groups on immersive listening walks, as they explore mental health, memory, and the transformative power of sound.
Long Synopsis:
A Spider's Lunch & Other Sounds is a documentary that builds on an established research project, 'Greensounds', that explores the significance of 'green' (natural) acoustics and our understanding of ourselves as listener to the natural world. Set in Port Talbot, south Wales, amidst huge economic upheaval, we document men's Walk-and-Talk groups as they participate in our immersive listening walks over a summer.
They use directional microphones and headphones to amplify the forest soundscape - from distant industry to insects on the move. Microphones synced to record the audio of whatever the participants point at, paired with analogue and digital visuals designed to strengthen and intensify, absorb the film's audience into the experience.
Transcending ordinary walks in the woods, the film oscillates between discovery and memory; conversations emerge, intertwining personal narratives with broader themes of the environment, men's mental health and shifting identities.
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 uses of VR and other imaging technologies to treat patients with severe spinal cord injuries and other neuromuscular disorders. Toby Lee's film explores the interface between the physical and the technological, a zone in which the real and the virtual body blurs into one.
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 is a gauge of celluloid filmstrip that circulated exclusively in China between the 1960s and 1980s. Designed primarily for itinerant screenings in villages and rural areas, the format never had its own dedicated camera. By blending 8.75mm film prints with contemporary Super 8 footage, Peng Zuqiang takes us on a sensorial journey into the past of a country defined by rapid transformation, preserving a fragment of memory endangered by oblivion.
The mourning for a father and the absences, intertwined with what remains. Letters, written by birds that used to visit the filmmaker when she was a child, now reveal secrets to her son, whom she watches grow up.
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 film-essay is structured around readings of Crisp's own zuihitsu of the same name, which, in essence, is the story of his life. As we follow Crisp on a walk deeper into the ''little wood'' of his private landscape, the binaries of success and failure begin to fade away. The film presents Crisp as he reimagines himself as a simple duckweed plant, floating on the surface tension of earthly appearances. As he explores the implications of this identity, we are invited to speculate on our possible existence in another world; despite the undeniable knowledge of our gradual extinction in this one.
In April 2023, biologists published a study proving that plants emit sounds when subjected to various types of stress. These ultrasonic sounds remind me of the silence of our time, burying suffering. Bursts of flowers flicker along a filmstrip, just before or right after the flames. —Samy Benammar
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.
The city of Delhi is a site of constant excavation, formed by fragments of what is left behind. Archaeology becomes method and metaphor, revealing an absence in the ground around which the city forms.
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.
35mm of collaged film material reading like a diary without linear thought or narrative. A hodgepodge of photographic images spliced and taped with ecstatic handmade explosions of colour and texture. A fragmentary experience that revels in the material and provides an opaque and impenetrable portrait of the maker.
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?