Here are the winners of the 2025 Science New Wave Luminary Awards—a constellation of works that reimagine how science lives on screen: through signals, bodies, materials, voices, and forms still in motion.
As we close the year, we mark the third year in which the Science New Wave Luminary Awards are shaped and voted on by our Luminaries—an expanding body of artists, scientists, and thinkers who help attune how these films are perceived, activated, and carried forward. Looking ahead to 2026, Labocine enters its 10th year, shaped by a decade of experimentation, hybrid forms, and collective imagination.
Each year, Science New Wave Luminaries contribute in another essential way—by evaluating our annual slate of 64 selected films. Think of it as our own version of what Academy Award members or Film Independent committees do each year, but refracted through a distinctly Science New Wave lens, where experimentation, hybridity, and inquiry guide recognition.
Each of the 64 selected films is assigned a unique Genetic ID, displayed on its Labocine page. This ongoing Science New Wave Genetic Barcoding initiative timestamps and situates science moving-image works within a living archive—marking their place in history with a symbolic DNA barcode.
Poetically—and biologically—Luminaries evaluate these films as if observing gene expression. Just as expression varies depending on context, time, and interaction within a cell, cinematic expression shifts with environment, collaborators, and moment of emergence. Each Luminary becomes a kind of transcription factor in a larger cinematic organism—activating, muting, or modulating how these works resonate within our evolving ecosystem.
Science New Wave Award 2025: Messengers
Awarded to a film that expresses the six combined traits of the Science New Wave Manifesto.
Still from Messengers (Directed by Jeffrey Zablotny)
Messengers emerges as a work of transmission—moving between science, cinema, and collective responsibility. It embodies the ethos of the Science New Wave by translating knowledge into lived experience, reminding us that to observe, to document, and to share is already to act.
Honorable Mentions
In Vivo Award 2025: Vox Humana
Awarded to a film that paints a daring yet realistic portrait of a scientist and/or another living organism.
Still from Vox Humana (Directed by Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan)
Vox Humana enters the living body with sensitivity and precision, revealing science as an embodied, vocal, and relational practice. It captures research not as distant abstraction, but as something intimate—felt through breath, presence, and attention.
Honorable Mentions
Avant-Garde Award 2025: Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air
Awarded to a film best expressing hybrid aesthetics and experimentation.
Still from Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air (Directed by Sam Drake)
Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air dissolves the boundary between the visible and the invisible. Through radical form and sensory inquiry, it transforms atmosphere into subject—using cinema itself as a scientific instrument for sensing what usually escapes perception.
Honorable Mentions
About the Science New Wave Luminary Awards
The Science New Wave Luminary Awards honor films that do more than represent science—they interrogate, translate, and reinvent it through cinema. These works expand how knowledge is felt, imagined, and shared, shaping a living archive of experimentation across disciplines and geographies. We are all messengers (trait #6, SNW Manifesto)
