Playlist
<p>The work Penrose 11 by mathematicians William Casselman, David Austin, and David Wright, and the cross-section of a fruit fly's eye, narrated by biologist Jean Claude Ameisen.</p>
<p>In February 2009, the filmmaker captured footage above the rooftops of Linz using an inverted perspective. Employing a Super 16 camera, she moved it backward frame by frame, centimeter by centimeter. This animation technique imbues time, light, and shadow with an extraordinary presence.</p>
<p>The genetic diversity of various animal and plant species is visualized here through shapes that embody balance, symmetry, and an infinite potential for variation.</p>
<p>Dr. Hofmann, widely recognized as the father of LSD, dedicated his life to research at the Sandoz laboratories in Basel. From the moment of its discovery, he was captivated by its potential and spent his lifetime advocating for the responsible use of his "enfant terrible."</p>
<p>Based on data collected from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and other sites of intense bombings, Peter Watkins envisions the aftermath of a nuclear attack on England. His film meticulously examines the effects on the population and critiques the efficacy of government measures in response to such a catastrophe.</p>
<p>A dialogue between art and science unfolds as Jean Claude Ameisen explores the connections between Jackson Pollock's The Deep and the intricate forms revealed in X-rays of vertebrae. Both evoke a sense of structure emerging from chaos, inviting reflection on the hidden patterns that shape life and creativity.</p>
<p>The phrase "A bear in the botanical garden" evokes a striking and unexpected encounter between the untamed wilderness and the structured, cultivated world of humanity. This title could serve as a metaphor to delve into themes such as the complex interaction between humans and nature, or how animals, often deemed "exotic" or "wild," adapt or are confined within human spaces like botanical gardens or urban parks.</p>
<p>The starting point of this series was an interest in chaotic systems and their behavior, particularly water and waterways, within a "parallel digital space" created specifically for this purpose.</p>
<p>The British choreographer Wayne McGregor embarks on numerous experiments, sources of endless exploration and enrichment. Whether creating with the dancers of his company or rehearsing with those of the Royal Ballet, his focus, energy, and demands remain the same. When he visualizes the first prototypes of the software he is developing with a team of computer scientists, we already see him imagining the potential of this new tool to generate movement.</p>
<p>The filmmaker learns she has breast cancer. It’s a shock. Will her life end tomorrow? How can she face this? The filmmaker within her decides to support the patient in search of meaning. In pursuit of a healing process that is as internal as it is physical, her camera weaves a dialogue between conventional medicine and complementary therapies. She explores all dimensions of this disease, which affects one in nine women.</p>
<p>The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the cochlea, as narrated by biologist Jean Claude Ameisen.</p>
<p>At the dawn of the 21st century, we are struck by the explosive cocktail of biblical or Quranic verses, political messages, and murderous actions that ignite wars "in the name of God." But, like music, words can also bring life, enlighten the mind, and build connections across borders. This investigative film on fundamentalism, on the dangerous relationships between politics and religion, between religions and science, traces its path between Walls and Bridges.</p>
<p>A retired scientist recalls the activation, at the beginning of the 21st century, of the most complex machine ever created by mankind: a particle accelerator designed to unravel the secret of the origins of the Universe.</p>
<p>On a winter day in Seattle, the Volunteer Park Conservatory offers a journey through a different climate: lush, colorful, strange, and splendid...</p>
<p>The film follows, over the course of a season, the archaeologists from the Nîmes Archaeological Center. They probe, survey, prospect, dig, reconstruct, write, cross-check their hypotheses, and discuss their profession and passion.</p>
<p>A composition by the painter Wols and a head of a Drosophila fly seem to be observing us. This relationship with the other, whether fear or empathy, is narrated by the biologist Jean Claude Ameisen.</p>
<p>In the gardens of La Crau, there is Andrée, the elegant seamstress, Françoise with her inseparable baby monkey, André, the tireless singer of La Java Bleue, Lucie with her devastating humor, Maria the Greek... These are just a few of the people living with Alzheimer's disease, as if lost in an unknown land, at the borders of a forgotten past, in a story that reinvents itself every day.</p>
<p>What is a portrait? A portrait is discovering someone's personality, uncovering their face, their habits, what they want to do. Whether they want to stay in the day hospital, or if they want to talk about something in their life.</p>
<p>Based on archival documents blending news footage, government archives, and military records, this portrait is both frightening and hilarious of a country that, from nuclear shelters to government propaganda, establishes a true climate of paranoia.</p>
<p>Based on the journal of Guillaume Bohr, a French physicist, the film explores the nine days during which he disappeared before taking his own life in February 2006, near Moscow.</p>
<p>Michael Berger, a thirty-something ambitious Austrian, is accused of defrauding investors of several million dollars through hedge funds. As a sober and captivating narrative intertwines factual details of the fraud with random bits about Berger's life, we embark on a search for him across Austria, London, New York, in an upscale restaurant, a rented apartment, and a busy street.</p>
<p>"Can a hunter hunt without his hunting dog?" A tongue twister is a phrase that is difficult to pronounce. In the form of a poetic collage, alternating between landscapes and portraits, this film invites various models, mostly American, filmed in a studio in Berkeley, to say tongue twisters in their mother tongue or second language: German, English, Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, Chinese, Korean, Croatian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Tagalog, Vietnamese.</p>
<p>For fifteen years, the multidisciplinary team at the Primo Levi Center in Paris has been welcoming victims of torture and political violence from over forty countries. Foreigners, exiles, and asylum seekers, they carry the multiple scars of the suffering linked to their personal history, a history that is always unique and echoes a collective history.</p>
<p>How does one recover from a cerebrovascular accident? For several months, Emmanuel Finkiel filmed the daily struggle of three patients, their families, and the healthcare staff at a rehabilitation center for brain injury victims. It’s a journey that will lead them to regain their consciousness and identity.</p>
<p>The eyes of the camera open, blink, and see; they scan the perspective in 360 degrees.</p>
<p>An exercise in visual relativity in the form of a journey through space and time with the wheel.</p>
<p>A cinematic roller coaster ride with a performer who literally holds the spectator at the top of a pole, zooms in on them from a rooftop, and falls at their feet.</p>
<p>The smiling spider by Odilon Redon and a nerve cell from the brain, narrated by biologist Jean-Claude Ameisen.</p>
<p>In my family, we learn to grow and live with a neurodegenerative disease, Huntington's disease. A disease that slowly robs us of all our faculties. A disease that can settle in gradually, at any age, before it takes us away. I grew up with the fear of this disease. Today, there is a test to know if I carry the gene. I have a one in two chance.</p>
<p>They would like to fly to Mars right away. Crazy, mad, whimsical? No, just serious people—scientists, architects, students, engineers, writers. Men and women who are convinced that the conquest of Mars would ensure the survival of the human species and could help better understand the origin of life on Earth.</p>
<p>Since comets have been recorded, they’ve augured disaster: catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage. ...These Blazeing Starrs! juxtaposes a modern empirical desire to probe and measure against older methods, when star gazers were translators, explicating the sky more intuitively for predictions of human folly. Comets are now understood as time capsules harboring elemental information about the formation of our solar system. Today we smash rockets into them to read spectral signatures. In a sense, they remain oracles-it’s just the manner of divining which has changed.</p>
<p>Using a simple camera movement, “Downside Up” explores and revisits the potential relationships with the earth’s soil. The point of view continually orbits around places, objects, people and events. The observations accelerate gradually to reveal a two-faced ground that turns like a flipped coin and slows down again to oscillate around the earth’s extremities.</p>