Beginning this Friday, both in-person in NYC and virtually, The 15th Annual Imagine Science Film Festival is ready to blow your mind.

15th Annual Imagine Science Film Festival
(October 14-21)


Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s Utama opens the festival
with a gala screening at the Museum of the Moving Image


Spotlight screenings include Godard’s classic
Alphaville, Ali Cherri’s The Dam (Le Barrage),
Jacqueline Mills’ Geographies of Solitude,
and Signe Baumane’s My Love Affair with Marriage



This year’s festival is overflowing with cool. Here are a few of the films we’ve previously covered. 

My Love Affair With Marriage

Fire of Love

Maika: The Girl from Another Galaxy 

Of Medicine and Miracles

For more information on this year’s edition, continue below!

 

New York City’s Imagine Science Film Festival
announced the lineup of films and events for the hybrid presentation of its 15 th edition, taking
place October 14-21. Screenings will kick off with the Opening Night presentation of Alejandro
Loayza Grisi’s Utama, and Spotlight Features including a special presentation of Jean-Luc
Godard’s classic Alphaville: The Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution, Ali Cherri’s The
Dam (Le Barrage), Jacquelyn Mills’ Geographies of Solitude, and Signe Baumane’s My Love
Affair with Marriage.

This year continues Imagine Science’s unique exploration through cinema of the intersection between science and society. This year’s theme is Science New Wave, characterized by its rejection of traditional scientific film conventions and stereotypes in favor of experimentation and personal expression. The festival will include 101 films (29 features and 72 short films) from 40 countries. 

Imagine Science will also utilize its art/science networking tool, Habitat, as well as the film festival’s own streaming platform, Labocine, as the only film festival which has its very own platform (as opposed to a third-party platform). The innovations allow the film festival to bring together art and science communities to spark true collaboration (Habitat) and encourage audiences to view the festival’s programming with an eye toward their greater mission to foster that intersection between art and science, like this year’s Science New Wave theme. This year’s initiative to engage art/science collaborations and a community of scientists and filmmakers beyond the NYC-based film festival itself has over 3000 multidisciplinary people participating on the ambitious project.

Imagine Science FF Programming Coordinator Natalia Solórzano, said “This year’s Imagine Science Film Festival is by far the most ambitious undertaking, worthy of its 15th year of existence. Films coming from corners of the world will accompany us during these 8 days. Spectators will discover the visit of a supernatural presence in a Cosa Rican sci-fi film, Canadian confessions of grim futures, cinematographic archives of a Mexican grandfather, the journey of a climate activist from Ecuador to Switzerland, and the surreal frog downpour in the Philippines, amongst many other horizons, themes, sensitivities, and perspectives. Over 100 films from distinct voices will join our Science New Wave edition.”

ISFF Artistic Director and Founder Alexis Gambis, added, “Imagine Science is now a teenager, and looking back at how far we’ve come, we have survived hurricanes, pandemics, and recessions. Survival of the fittest. It adapts with each swing, blow, or change in its habitat. Experimentation, research, and community-building are part of this organization’s DNA. Imagine Science acts as a mirror to show others the many ways we can create and make scientifically enriched narratives. We are all messengers. This year, we continue to celebrate the Science New Wave. This movement (also hybrid organism) draws inspiration from early science cinema and concepts in biological sciences. Personally, La Nouvelle Vague is on my mind these days. It gave courage to an entire generation to experiment with the rules of storytelling and break away from conventions and rules. Godard forever.”

Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s Utama will open the film festival, screening at the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) on Friday, October 14. A winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance earlier this year, and Bolivia’s Oscar selection this year, the film follows an elderly Bolivian couple whose life traditions are threatened by the drought and water shortage resulting from climate change.    
      
As part of this year’s Science New Wave, Imagine Science FF will pay tribute to the French New Wave with a special presentation of Godard’s classic Alphaville: The Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution (1965). Screening on Sunday, October 16 at Cinema Village, the film focuses on a secret agent who is sent to the distant space city of Alphaville where he must find a missing person and free the city from its tyrannical ruler. Along with Breathless, the film established Godard as an influential auteur who truly shook up the world of cinema.
 

 
Among the other Spotlight films, Ali Cherri’s The Dam (Le Barrage) is about a bricklayer in Darfur, who secretly works on the erection of a structure made of mud, wood, and plastic that begins to take on an almost organic-looking form, until one day it mysteriously disappears. Soon, the man starts to get the uneasy feeling that someone or something is watching him. In Jacqueline Mills’ Geographies of Solitude, the director looks at the population of wild horses and the biodiversity of Sable Island off of Nova Scotia as viewed and studied by conservationist Zoe Lucas since the 1970s. Daily trips around the island to observe the local flora and fauna. have made the former art student and self-taught scientist an esteemed expert of the environment there. Signe Baumane’s My Love Affair with Marriage is a semi-autobiographical musical exploration of love, sex, romance, and gender as viewed through the lens of neurochemistry. The film’s multiple thematic threads follow a woman from childhood to young adulthood and into middle age, through several marriages and across multiple continents, in search of true love. 


Neptune Frost

Highlights among the other feature films which demonstrate the nearly boundless and borderless scope and variety of this year’s Imagine Science film program include Sara Dosa’s critically-acclaimed Fire of Love. The documentary tells the one-of-a-kind romance between two scientists and their singular devotion to their study of volcanoes which ultimately took their lives. It is that rare film that equally matches stunning footage with a stunning story. Ham Tran’s Maika: The Girl from Another Galaxy is a delightful Vietnamese children’s sci-fi adventure about a young boy who finds solace, a friend and adventure following the loss of his mother with an adorable alien girl who needs his help as much as he needs hers. Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s Neptune Frost delivers a very different type of sci-fi adventure set in an otherworldly e-waste camp made of recycled computer parts. The cyber musical love story about a subversive hacking collective that attempts a takeover of an authoritarian regime is led by an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner who have found each other through cosmic forces. The Year of the Everlasting Storm features seven interconnected stories chronicling the effect of the pandemic by a world class group of filmmakers including Jafar Panâhi, Malik Vitthal, Anthony Chen, Laura Poitras, Dominga Sotomayor, David Lowery, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Andreas Horvath’s Zoo Lock Down offers a rare look at the zoo in Salzburg, Austria during the time when the zoo was closed off to visitors as the animals continue to live their lives.  
 
Other highlights include Imagine Science’s Symbiosis Competition, which brings together filmmakers and scientists to create a science-inspired short film during the week of the film festival, the Science New Wave Works-in-Progress presentation from the NYU Production Lab, and the Labocine Close-Ups that will offer select titles for streaming throughout the Imagine Science Film Festival.


Passes and tickets, including the Science New Wave pass which gives film and science fans
access to both the NYC-based screenings and events as well as the streaming titles on
Labocine are on sale now. For more information on purchasing and additional details, please
visit: https://www.imaginesciencefilms.org/ny15/tickets.


 

The 2022 Imagine Science Film Festival official selections:

 

OPENING NIGHT

OPENING NIGHT

 
Utama
Director: Alejandro Loayza Grisi        
Countries: Bolivia/Uruguay, France; Running Time: 87 min
In the Bolivian highlands, an elderly Quechua couple has been living the same daily routine for years. When an uncommonly long drought threatens their entire way of life, Virginio and Sisa face the dilemma of resisting or being defeated by the passage of time. With the arrival of their grandson Clever, the three of them will face, each in their own way, the environment, the necessity for change, and the meaning of life itself.
 

 
SPOTLIGHT FEATURES

 
Alphaville: The Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution (1965)    
Director: Jean-Luc Godard     
Country: France; Running Time: 99 min
Government agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) is dispatched on a secret mission to Alphaville, a dystopian metropolis in a distant corner of the galaxy. Caution is hot on the trail of rogue agent Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff) and a scientist named Von Braun, the creator of Alpha 60, a computer that uses mind control to rule over residents of Alphaville. Caution is aided in his quest to destroy the despotic computer ruler by Von Braun’s own daughter, Natacha (Anna Karina).
 
The Dam (Le Barrage)          
Director: Ali Cherri      
Country: Sudan; Running Time: 84 min
North Sudan, Merowe Dam. Abu Salma, a seasonal worker from Darfur, works in a traditional brickyard on the Nile, downstream of the dam. Just like his exiled companions, he spends his days in the mud, far from his loved ones and in exhausting labour. Each night, he secretly works on the erection of a structure, a tall shape made of mud, wood, and plastic. As the mud builds over the solid skeleton of the structure, it begins to take on an almost organic-looking form. One day, as he returns from Jebel Barkal, the mystical mountain, his creation has mysteriously disappeared. Soon strange occurrences begin to take place, and Abu Salma starts to get the uneasy feeling that someone or something is watching him.
 
Geographies of Solitude      
Director: Jacquelyn Mills        
Country: Canada; Running Time: 104 min
Two women on a lonely island off the coast of Nova Scotia: Sable Island. Conservationist Zoe Lucas was an art student when she came there for the first time in the 1970s and has been living on this remote strip of land for decades now, mostly alone. Director Jacquelyn Mills films Lucas on her daily trips around the island to observe the local flora and fauna. Her studies of Sable Island’s population of wild horses, for which the island is famous, and of the biodiversity there in general have made the self-taught scientist an esteemed expert. 
 
My Love Affair with Marriage          
Director: Signe Baumane       
Country: USA, Latvia; Running Time: 83 min
Animator Signe Baumane turns her gaze inward for My Love Affair with Marriage, a semi-autobiographical musical exploration of love, sex, romance, and gender as viewed through the lens of neurochemistry. A Greek chorus of Latvian village women and a friendly neuron inside our protagonist’s brain connect the film’s multiple thematic threads, as we follow young Zelma from childhood to young adulthood and into middle age, through several marriages and across multiple continents, in search of true love. From Greek mythology to reproductive biology, from Moscow to Toronto, My Love Affair with Marriage takes a creative, light-hearted look at the human desire to find the person who will finally make us feel complete. Using both two-dimensional and stop-motion animation, Baumane blends earnest vulnerability and dry humor. It’s a film that’s both deeply personal and relatable to anyone who’s ever lost themselves in a romantic relationship.
 
 

LABOCINE CLOSE-UPS

 
O, Collecting Eggs Despite the Times (O, Eier sammeln trotz der Zeit)            
Director: Pim Zweir     
Country: Germany; Running Time: 80 min
The unconventional documentary “O” exposes the intriguing fascination for the Egg. O is set in the twentieth century, when the German ornithologist Max Schönwetter devotes himself to his life’s work: the scientific handbook of the egg. While he frantically collects and studies 19.206 eggs and corresponds with ornithologists, oologists, expedition members, museum staff, collectors, traitors, and soldiers to expand his knowledge, the Second World War starts to evolve. O is an archive film of which the texts are wholly based on the historical correspondence of Max Schönwetter. While the passages from the correspondence form a polyphonic collage of voice-overs, the documentary portrays in staged scenes the ‘kammerspiel’ of Schönwetter’s small world of collecting eggs, in contrast with the events on the world stage, which are visualized through film archive material.
 
The Great Refractor 
Director: Andy Graydon          
Country: USA; Running Time: 32 min
The Great Refractor, a collaboration with Irish poet and neuroscientist Laurence O’Dwyer, charts the undulating terrain of our attempts to understand the world through both scientific and poetic inquiries. The film contrasts histories of mapping, visualizing, and territorializing with contemporary practices centered on sounding, listening and collective resonation. The film models a ‘refractive’ method of narration and authorship, one that seeks out possible transformations and decolonization of our processes of interpreting and sharing the world. The film presents a series of solitary figures engaged in their work, including an astrophysicist, an artist, a translator, and a weather station engineer. Participants were asked to mimic with their voices the sounds of sonified observations, from underwater hydrophone recordings to black hole gravitation waves. 
 
The Sower of Stars (El sembrador de estrellas)   
Director: Lois Patinho
Country: Portugal; Running Time: 25 min
Distant lights reveal the outline of a city. Illuminated ships cross the water with sleeping people on board and the night appears to become liquid. The sower of stars wakes them and travels with them through the city. They talk about this and that – and say goodbye to everything.
 
Medusa          
Director: Chloe Malcotti          
Country: Belgium; Running Time: 77 min
The Italian coastal town of Rosignano is known and loved for its extremely white beaches and intensely blue sea. From far and wide, camera crews and tourists come to enjoy its beauty. But these extraordinary features are the result of decades of pollution by a plant belonging to the Solvay company, which produces soda ash, or sodium carbonate. This unorthodox and creative film shows how the chemical company has brought not only pollution but also much wealth to the community. In staged scenes on the beach, young residents talk about the future of their town and the ambivalent relationship with the company. A medium evokes the past using an X-ray of a former employee. These scenes are mixed with lyrical images of the stunning beaches and sea, and hypnotic shots of the work in the factory.
 
The Last Human        
Director: Ivalo Frank   
Country: Denmark, Greenland; Running Time: 80 min
Our most basic understanding of the origins of life was recently turned upside down when Greenlandic scientist Minik Rosing discovered the first traces of life on Earth in a small fjord near Isua. His discovery predated all previous traces of life by over 300 million years. Life began in Greenland. But at the same time, its melting ice masses are accelerating day by day, and scientists around the world agree that it could drown our entire civilization if it is allowed to continue. The end of life will also start from Greenland. 
 
White Noise   
Director: Simon Beaulieu       
Country: Canada; Running Time: 77 min
A reflection on the fate of humanity in the Anthropocene epoch, White Noise is a roller-coaster of a film, a whirlwind of sounds and images. The fourth feature-length work by Simon Beaulieu, this film essay plunges viewers into a subjective sensory adventure—a direct physical encounter with the information overload of daily life. White Noisetransforms the imminent collapse of our civilization in the era of climate change and eco-anxiety into a visceral aesthetic experience.
 
 

SCIENCE NEW WAVE FEATURES

 
Burial  
Director: Emilija Skarnulyte    
Country: Lithuania, Norway; Running Time: 60 min
A python slithers and curls over the abandoned control room of Chernobyl’s sister, the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, its radioactive core an unleashed monster that will slither through time for a million years. From Etruscan ruins and sunken cities to the most modern of underground repositories, director Emilija Škarnulytė follows our attempts to bury the immortal. Addressing the epochal effects of nuclear technology on all levels, Burial follows the cycle of power, an eternal return, another serpent eating its tail.
 
Derek Changes His Mind     
Directors: Derek Dabkoski, Ian McClellan, Im Joong Kim     
Country: USA; Running Time: 78 min
Derek Dabkoski enrolls in a year long, double blind medical study of the effects of modified stem cell surgery to treat traumatic brain injuries in the hopes he might regain the function lost after the brutal mugging that left him partially paralyzed on his right side. What he discovers, ultimately, is that his commitment to improving his quality of life, shows him he has the strength to help his wife Nadia attain her US residency and raise their newborn daughter Carmen.
 
H6       
Director: Ye Ye           
Country: China; Running Time: 114 min
The Sixth People’s Hospital is one of the biggest in Shanghai. Its corridors are filled with medical staff, patients, and families whose lives have been turned upside-down. A series of interconnecting stories paint a picture of China as it is today, where hypermodernism meets cultural tradition. Confronted with life’s ups and downs, the sensitivity and sense of humor of the Chinese people emerges when least expected, helping them to find a sense of personal balance.
 
Helena from Sarayaku
Director: Eriberto Gualinga     
Country: Ecuador; Running Time: 70 min
Helena is a 17-year-old student in Finland. Her father is Swedish, and her mother is originally from the Kichwa people of Sarayaku, who live in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon. On a recent trip there, Helena participates in the traditional Uyantza Raymi cultural festival, and meets with Kichwa leaders who ask her to deliver a message to the world — Kawsak Sacha, or ‘Living Forest,’ an innovative concept in conservation, in which the jungle is considered to be a living being. After COVID-19 confines Helena in Puyo — the closest city to Sarayaku — she learns that 80% of her community has been infected with the virus, and that the Bobonaza River has flooded part of her village. 
 
Fire of Love   
Director: Sara Dosa    
Country: USA, Canada; Running Time: 93 min
Katia and Maurice Krafft loved two things — each other and volcanoes. For two decades, the daring French volcanologist couple roamed the planet, chasing eruptions, documenting their discoveries. Ultimately, they lost their lives in a 1991 volcanic explosion, leaving a legacy that forever enriched our knowledge of the natural world. Director Sara Dosa and the filmmaking team fashion a lyrical celebration of the intrepid scientists’ spirit of adventure, drawing from the Kraffts’ spectacular archive. Fire of Love tells a story of primordial creation & destruction, following two bold explorers as they venture into the unknown, all for the sake of love.
 
Into the Ice     
Director: Lars Ostenfeld         
Country: Denmark; Running Time: 90 min
Into the Ice is a journey of discovery to the vast masses of ice and the secret of our future that the ice harbouring. Director Lars Ostenfeld accompanies three of the world’s leading glaciologists on pioneering scientific expeditions to and INTO the Greenland ice sheet. Cool and hardworking Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, sensitive and politically engaged Jason Box, and daring and fearless Alun Hubbard are all working to collect new crucial data that can help us answer some key questions of our time: How fast is the ice melting? How quickly are sea levels rising? How much time do we have left to change the course of the Earth? 
 
Karmalink      
Director: Jake Wachtel           
Country: Cambodia; Running Time: 102 min
Conceived as a way to interrogate processes of neo-colonialism, and highlighting the alienating effects of technological progress, Jake Wachtel’s Karmalink is a mind-bending tale of reincarnation, artificial consciousness, and the search for enlightenment. In near-future Phnom Penh, the rich and privileged are augmented with nanotech, and new skyscrapers crowd the skyline. In Tralok Bek, a tight-knit community threatened with forced eviction, 13-year-old Leng Heng is having vivid dreams of his past lives. He and his friends are convinced they are meant to find a buried Buddhist statue to save their homes, and they seek out help from a street-smart girl in the neighborhood, Srey Leak. Together they follow clues across town and into the past, uncovering a link with a genius neuroscientist on a quest for digital nirvana. As Leng Heng’s dreams converge on the present, his very sense of identity begins to unravel. When it becomes clear that the stakes are higher than they imagined, the two friends must decide how far they are willing to go to find their treasure and the truth.
 
Letter from Yene       
Director: Manthia Diawara      
Country: Senegal; Running Time: 50 min
Letter from Yene emerges from conversations with the community in the seaside town of Yene, Senegal, where Diawara lives for part of the year. The area was traditionally and primarily occupied by fishermen and farmers but has in recent decades been besieged by coastal erosion and uncontrolled urbanization. Fish have become scarce and the pirogues, traditional fishing boats, cannot go far enough into the sea, so their owners have turned to new occupations. Modern fishing requires motorized boats and large nets made from non-biodegradable wires that become lethally entangled with purple coral, and human detritus, eventually washing up on shores like woven creatures of the sea. The women who used to smoke fish and preserve it as part of a sustainable mode of living now sell pebbles to the owners of the newly built houses. 
 
Maika: The Girl from Another Galaxy         
Director: Ham Tran     
Country: Vietnam; Running Time: 105 min
After losing his mother to illness and his best friend to an unexpected move, a young boy discovers a crashed spaceship and makes a new friend with awesome powers (although she does need a little help with her earthly social skills). Together, they embark on a zany, fun-filled adventure while taking on the bad guys and helping Maika find her way home.
 
Neptune Frost           
Directors: Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman     
Country: Rwanda; Running Time: 105 min
A group of escaped coltan miners forms an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective in the hilltops of Burundi. They soon attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime that’s exploiting the region’s natural resources — and its people.
 
Of Medicine and Miracles    
Director: Ross Kauffman        
Country: USA; Running Time: 95 min
At the age of six, Emily Whitehead was diagnosed with leukemia and the lives of her, and her parents were suddenly thrust into uncertainty. Through bracingly honest interviews and home videos, Of Medicine and Miraclesdetails her family’s experience bouncing from hospital to hospital, trying to stay hopeful amidst hopelessness, and their fateful correspondence with a doctor whose research could hold the key to her survival. But time is of the essence. 
 
Scales (Sayidat Al Bahr)      
Director: Shahad Ameen        
Country: Saudi Arabia; Running Time: 75 min
Set in a dystopian landscape, SCALES is the story of a young strong-willed girl, Hayat, who lives in a poor fishing village governed by a dark tradition in which every family must give one daughter to the sea creatures who inhabit the waters nearby. In turn the sea creatures are hunted by the men of the village. Saved from this fate by her father, Hayat is considered a curse on the village and grows up an outcast. Nevertheless, she does not surrender to this fate and fights for a place within her village. After her mother gives birth to a baby boy, Hayat must accept the brutal custom of giving herself to the sea creatures or finding a way to escape.
 
The Human Trial – Would you go first?      
Directors: Lisa Hepner, Guy Mossman          
Country: USA; Running Time: 92 min
In 2011, Lisa Hepner and her husband Guy Mossman heard about a radical stem cell treatment for diabetes, a disease that shockingly kills more than five million people each year. Driven by a desire to cure Lisa of her own type 1 diabetes (T1D), the filmmakers were given unprecedented, real-time access to a clinical trial — only the sixth-ever embryonic stem cell trial in the world. What follows is an intimate decade-long journey with the patients and scientists who put themselves on the line to be first.
 
The Invisible Extinction       
Directors: Steven Lawrence, Sarah Schenck
Country: USA; Running Time: 80 min
Superstar scientists Gloria Dominguez-Bello and Marty Blaser confront an international public health emergency – the loss of our ancestral microbes – while three patients with life-threatening diseases triggered by this disruption explore experimental treatments to save their lives. Most people think germs (another word for microbes) are bad for us, but what if they’re mostly good and wiping out the ones inside us is creating a health crisis that threatens humanity’s future? That’s the driving question behind “The Invisible Extinction,” a documentary film that follows globetrotting microbiologists Gloria Dominguez-Bello and Marty Blaser on their urgent quest to protect and restore our microbes before it’s too late. 
  
The Sacred Spirit (Espíritu sagrado)          
Director: Chema Garcia Ibarra           
Country: Spain, France, Turkey; Running Time: 97 min
Julio is dead. It’s terrible news for OVNI Levante, the association of ufology aficionados that he ran. The death hits one its members, José Manuel, particularly hard. Julio and he had a secret project to change human destiny. Now he must carry on alone. José Manuel and the other members of the ufology association Ovni-Levante meet weekly to exchange information about extraterrestrial messages and abductions. Julio, their leader, dies unexpectedly, leaving José Manuel as the only person who knows about the cosmic secret that could alter the human future. Meanwhile in Spain a search is going on for a little girl who disappeared some weeks before.
 
The Year of the Everlasting Storm
Directors: Jafar Panâhi, Malik Vitthal, Anthony Chen, Laura Poitras, Dominga Sotomayor, David Lowery, Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Country: USA; Running Time: 155 min
Seven stories from seven directors from around the world chronicle the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
Time Theorem (Teorema de Tiempo)         
Director: Andres Kaiser          
Country: Mexico; Running Time: 90 min
Years after the death of my grandmother Anita, I inspected the old building where she and my grandfather Arnoldo worked all their lives as printers. Among offset machines, accounting notebooks and paper envelopes smelling of mothballs, I found thousands of photographs and hundreds of home movies. The images not only revealed their secret profession as amateur filmmakers, but also related a line of painful family tragedies that marked the destiny of their existence.
 
Tigre Gente    
Director: Elizabeth Unger       
Country: USA; Running Time: 93 min
A Bolivian park ranger and a young Hong Kongese journalist risk their lives to go undercover and investigate a new, deadly jaguar trade that’s sweeping South America. Along the way, they grapple with questions of empathy, responsibility, and bridging a cultural gap to prevent the jaguar trade from spiraling out of control. Shuttling between the breathtaking biodiversity of Madidi National Park in Bolivia and the tense China-Myanmar border, 
 
Life Begins, Life Ends (Vida Comienza, Vida Termina)   
Director: Rafael Palacio Illingworth    
Country: Argentina, Switzerland; Running Time: 80 min
Argentinian poet Fabian Casas wrote that everything which rots forms a family. There are two families in this film, each mirroring the other, but time is not there to orchestrate a decomposition. When things end abruptly and unintentionally, they leave a void that resembles a cliff; a movement suddenly cut, like jumping off a spinning carousel and finding the stillness of the ground profoundly disorienting. 
 
Zoo Lock Down         
Director: Andreas Horvath      
Country: Austria; Running Time: 72 min
The zoo in Salzburg, Austria is open to visitors 365 days a year. In the spring of 2020, when the first Covid lockdown brought life almost to a standstill, the zoo had to close its doors to the public for the first time in its existence. Like actors in a theater, it is the animals at a zoo that attract the audience. Unlike actors the animals don’t play roles. They are just being themselves and their home transforms into a stage every day. When the paying visitors fail to appear because the spectacle is canceled, a unique opportunity unfolds for an intimate and at times surreal look at the zoo’s inhabitants.
 
 

NARRATIVE SHORTS

 
AFREET: Honeycomb Boom
Director: Omar Adnan Al-Nakib
Country: Kuwait; Running Time: 10 min
 
Bad Seed (Mauvaise graine)
Director: Nadège Herrygers
Country: France; Running Time: 12 min
 
Celebritas Ex Machina
Director: Joe Nicolosi
Country: United States; Running Time: 12 min
 
Coming Out with the Help of a Time Machine
Director: Naman Gupta
Country: United States; Running Time: 15 min
 
Diseases of trees (Las enfermedades de los árboles)
Director: Didac Gimenso Alfonso
Country: Spain; Running Time: 12 min
 
Further and Further Away (Chhngai Dach Alai)
Director: Polen Ly
Country: Cambodia; Running Time: 24 min
 
Haulout
Director: Evgenia Arbugaeva, Maxim Arbugaev
Country: United Kingdom; Running Time: 25 min
 
Pragma
Director: Ellie Heydon
Country: United Kindom; Running Time: 19 min
 
Sideral
Director: Carlos Segundo
Country: France; Running Time: 15 min
 
Spark
Director: Camille Hollett-French
Country: Canada; Running Time: 19 min
 
Suncatcher (Atrapaluz)
Director: Kim Torres
Country: Costa Rica; Running Time: 21 min
 
Teacher
Director: Xiaoting Zhong
Country: China; Running Time: 18 min
 
The Unveiled
Director: Andres Rovira
Country: United States; Running Time: 9 min
 
This Wild Abyss
Director: Thomas Mendolia
Country: United States; Running Time: 23 min
 
 

DOCUMENTARY SHORTS

 
A River of Winter (Un fleuve d’hiver)
Director: Félix Lamarche
Country: Canada; Running Time: 27 min
 
As We See (Como Miramos)
Director: Xavier Nueno
Country: Spain; Running Time: 22 min
 
Black Mayonnaise
Director: Nathan Kensinger
Country: United States
; Running Time: 9 min
 
Déversement (Release) 
Director: Baptiste Grison
Country: Canada; Running Time: 9 min
 
Dream of a Shadow (Work-in-progress)
Director: Peter Galison
Country: United States; Running Time: 20 min
 
Everything near becomes distant
Director: Yunyi Zhu
Country: France; Running Time: 22 min
 
Exhumed (Exhumados)
Director: Rodrigo Moreno Esquivel
Country: México; Running Time: 9 min
 
IEVA
Director: Vytautas Plukas, Domas Petronis
Country: Lithuania; Running Time: 14 min
 
Light of the Night
Director: Matej Pok
Country: Slovakia; Running Time: 40 min
 
Men of Salt (Hombres de Sal)
Director: Luis Armando Sosa Gil
Country: Mexico; Running Time: 14 min
 
NAYA (Der Wald hat Tausend Augen)
Director: Sebastian Mulder
Country: Netherlands; Running Time: 24 min
 
Nuisance Bear
Director: Jack Weisman, Gabriela Osio Vanden
Country: Canada; Running Time: 14 min
 
Quarries
Director: Ellie Ga
Country: Sweden, Portugal, France; Running Time: 40 min

The Ball in the Center
Director: Julien Lamy
Country: France; Running Time: 5 min
 
The Two Faces of Tomorrow 
Director: Patrick Hough
Country: United Kingdom; Running Time: 38 min
 
 

ANIMATION SHORTS

 
A Language of Shapes
Director: Samantha Moore
Country: United Kingdom; Running Time: 6 min
 
Anxious Body
Director: Yoriko Mizushiri
Country: France; Running Time: 6 min
 
Boobs (Lolos)
Director: Marie Valade
Country: Canada; Running Time: 7 min
 
Dreamer of a Final Theory
Director: Molly Murphy
Country: United States; Running Time: 1 min
 
Elena
Director: Birutė Sodeikaitė
Country: Lithuania; Running Time: 12 min
 
Imagination Blind: Aphantasia Explained
Director: George Lee
Country: United Kindom; Running Time: 1 min
 
It’s Raining Frogs Outside
Director: Maria Estela Paiso
Country: Phillipines; Running Time: 14 min
 
Of Wood
Director: Owen Klatte
Country: USA; Running Time: 7 min
 
Our Friendly Little Bugs (Nos Amies Les Petites Bêtes)
Director: Marie-Jo Long
Country: France; Running Time: 4 min
 
Patouille and the Parachute Seeds
Director: Inès Bernard-Espina, Mélody Boulissière, Clémentine Campos
Country: France; Running Time: 7 min
 
Shadow of the Butterflies (L’Ombre des papillons)
Director: Sofia El Khyari
Country: France; Running Time: 7 min
 
The Sprayer
Director: Farnoosh Abedi
Country: Iran, Islamic Republic of; Running Time: 9 min
 
There’s a Bison on The Prairie
Director: Morgan Miller
Country: United States; Running Time: 7 min
 
Virtual Voice
Director: Suzannah Mirghani
Country: Qatar; Running Time: 7 min
 
 

EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS

 
A Perfect Storm
Director: Karel Doing
Country: Netherlands; Running Time: 3 min
 
Aralkum
Director: Mila Zhluktenko and Daniel Asadi Faezi
Country: Uzbekistan, Germany; Running Time: 14 min
 
Aribada
Director: Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Natalia Escobar
Country: Germany; Running Time: 30 min
 
Bergtatt (Busy)
Director: Jan Otto Ertesvåg
Country: Norway; Running Time: 7 min
 
Biopixels
Director: sffe
Country: United States; Running Time: 4 min
 
Chaytu (Fantasma)
Director: Pavel Quevedo
Country: Costa Rica; Running Time: 7 min
 
Chemical Somnia
Director: Scott Portingale
Country: Canada; Running Time: 4 min
 
Cinegraffic Score 
Director: Tim Grabham
Country: United Kingdom; Running Time: 5 min
 
Constant
Director: Sasha Litvintseva
Country: Germany, United Kingdom; Running Time: 40 min
 
Diteggiatura
Director: Riccardo Giacconi
Country: Italia; Running Time: 17 min
 
Etat du Langage
Director: Camille Zisswiller, Nicolas Lefebvre
Country: France; Running Time: 13 min
 
Forests (Forets)
Director: Simon Plouffe
Country: Canada; Running Time: 16 min
 
Global Fruit
Director: G. Anthony Svatek
Country: United States; Running Time: 4 min
 
Hybrid Terrains
Director: Elise Guillaume
Country: Belgium; Running Time: 6 min
 
Interior Seis (Interior six)
Director: Mauricio Sánchez Arias
Country: Mexico; Running Time: 16 min
 
La Plage aux êtres
Director: Kendra McLaughlin
Country: France; Running Time: 20 min
 
Moonrise 
Director: Rowena Potts
Country: Australia; Running Time: 11 min
 
Nanoscapes
Director: Kristina Dutton
Country: United States; Running Time: 3 min
 
Off-Power
Director: Theodora Barat
Country: France; Running Time: 17 min
 
Places We’ll Breathe (Mjesta koja cemo disati)
Director: Davor Sanvincenti
Country: Croatia; Running Time: 21 min
 
Subserotic Bulge
Director: Flis Holland
Country: Finland; Running Time: 18 min
 
Terrain Vague
Director: Edward Kihn
Country: United States; Running Time: 48 min
 
The Empty Sphere
Director: Stéphanie Roland
Country: Micronesia, Federated States of; Running Time: 19 min
 
Wrought
Director: Joel Penner, Anna Sigrithur
Country: Canada; Running Time: 19 min
 
 

ABOUT IMAGINE SCIENCE FILM FESTIVAL 
Imagine Science FF is an annual science film festival in New York that debuted I 2008 and takes place all across the city in diverse venues, including cinemas, universities, and museums. The organization also hosts a series of satellite events worldwide and serves a major venue for the release of singular and bold works bridging the worlds of science and film. Imagine Science also seeks to challenge and expand the role of science in the current cultural discourse by providing a forum for adventurous interdisciplinary collaboration. A model of innovation, Imagine Science engages and fosters collaboration between art and science via its networking tool, Habitat, and its own streaming platform, Labocine.

OPENING NIGHT

 
Utama
Director: Alejandro Loayza Grisi        
Countries: Bolivia/Uruguay, France; Running Time: 87 min
In the Bolivian highlands, an elderly Quechua couple has been living the same daily routine for years. When an uncommonly long drought threatens their entire way of life, Virginio and Sisa face the dilemma of resisting or being defeated by the passage of time. With the arrival of their grandson Clever, the three of them will face, each in their own way, the environment, the necessity for change, and the meaning of life itself.
 

 
SPOTLIGHT FEATURES

 
Alphaville: The Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution (1965)    
Director: Jean-Luc Godard     
Country: France; Running Time: 99 min
Government agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) is dispatched on a secret mission to Alphaville, a dystopian metropolis in a distant corner of the galaxy. Caution is hot on the trail of rogue agent Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff) and a scientist named Von Braun, the creator of Alpha 60, a computer that uses mind control to rule over residents of Alphaville. Caution is aided in his quest to destroy the despotic computer ruler by Von Braun’s own daughter, Natacha (Anna Karina).
 
The Dam (Le Barrage)          
Director: Ali Cherri      
Country: Sudan; Running Time: 84 min
North Sudan, Merowe Dam. Abu Salma, a seasonal worker from Darfur, works in a traditional brickyard on the Nile, downstream of the dam. Just like his exiled companions, he spends his days in the mud, far from his loved ones and in exhausting labour. Each night, he secretly works on the erection of a structure, a tall shape made of mud, wood, and plastic. As the mud builds over the solid skeleton of the structure, it begins to take on an almost organic-looking form. One day, as he returns from Jebel Barkal, the mystical mountain, his creation has mysteriously disappeared. Soon strange occurrences begin to take place, and Abu Salma starts to get the uneasy feeling that someone or something is watching him.
 
Geographies of Solitude      
Director: Jacquelyn Mills        
Country: Canada; Running Time: 104 min
Two women on a lonely island off the coast of Nova Scotia: Sable Island. Conservationist Zoe Lucas was an art student when she came there for the first time in the 1970s and has been living on this remote strip of land for decades now, mostly alone. Director Jacquelyn Mills films Lucas on her daily trips around the island to observe the local flora and fauna. Her studies of Sable Island’s population of wild horses, for which the island is famous, and of the biodiversity there in general have made the self-taught scientist an esteemed expert. 
 
My Love Affair with Marriage          
Director: Signe Baumane       
Country: USA, Latvia; Running Time: 83 min
Animator Signe Baumane turns her gaze inward for My Love Affair with Marriage, a semi-autobiographical musical exploration of love, sex, romance, and gender as viewed through the lens of neurochemistry. A Greek chorus of Latvian village women and a friendly neuron inside our protagonist’s brain connect the film’s multiple thematic threads, as we follow young Zelma from childhood to young adulthood and into middle age, through several marriages and across multiple continents, in search of true love. From Greek mythology to reproductive biology, from Moscow to Toronto, My Love Affair with Marriage takes a creative, light-hearted look at the human desire to find the person who will finally make us feel complete. Using both two-dimensional and stop-motion animation, Baumane blends earnest vulnerability and dry humor. It’s a film that’s both deeply personal and relatable to anyone who’s ever lost themselves in a romantic relationship.
 
 

LABOCINE CLOSE-UPS

 
O, Collecting Eggs Despite the Times (O, Eier sammeln trotz der Zeit)            
Director: Pim Zweir     
Country: Germany; Running Time: 80 min
The unconventional documentary “O” exposes the intriguing fascination for the Egg. O is set in the twentieth century, when the German ornithologist Max Schönwetter devotes himself to his life’s work: the scientific handbook of the egg. While he frantically collects and studies 19.206 eggs and corresponds with ornithologists, oologists, expedition members, museum staff, collectors, traitors, and soldiers to expand his knowledge, the Second World War starts to evolve. O is an archive film of which the texts are wholly based on the historical correspondence of Max Schönwetter. While the passages from the correspondence form a polyphonic collage of voice-overs, the documentary portrays in staged scenes the ‘kammerspiel’ of Schönwetter’s small world of collecting eggs, in contrast with the events on the world stage, which are visualized through film archive material.
 
The Great Refractor 
Director: Andy Graydon          
Country: USA; Running Time: 32 min
The Great Refractor, a collaboration with Irish poet and neuroscientist Laurence O’Dwyer, charts the undulating terrain of our attempts to understand the world through both scientific and poetic inquiries. The film contrasts histories of mapping, visualizing, and territorializing with contemporary practices centered on sounding, listening and collective resonation. The film models a ‘refractive’ method of narration and authorship, one that seeks out possible transformations and decolonization of our processes of interpreting and sharing the world. The film presents a series of solitary figures engaged in their work, including an astrophysicist, an artist, a translator, and a weather station engineer. Participants were asked to mimic with their voices the sounds of sonified observations, from underwater hydrophone recordings to black hole gravitation waves. 
 
The Sower of Stars (El sembrador de estrellas)   
Director: Lois Patinho
Country: Portugal; Running Time: 25 min
Distant lights reveal the outline of a city. Illuminated ships cross the water with sleeping people on board and the night appears to become liquid. The sower of stars wakes them and travels with them through the city. They talk about this and that – and say goodbye to everything.
 
Medusa          
Director: Chloe Malcotti          
Country: Belgium; Running Time: 77 min
The Italian coastal town of Rosignano is known and loved for its extremely white beaches and intensely blue sea. From far and wide, camera crews and tourists come to enjoy its beauty. But these extraordinary features are the result of decades of pollution by a plant belonging to the Solvay company, which produces soda ash, or sodium carbonate. This unorthodox and creative film shows how the chemical company has brought not only pollution but also much wealth to the community. In staged scenes on the beach, young residents talk about the future of their town and the ambivalent relationship with the company. A medium evokes the past using an X-ray of a former employee. These scenes are mixed with lyrical images of the stunning beaches and sea, and hypnotic shots of the work in the factory.
 
The Last Human        
Director: Ivalo Frank   
Country: Denmark, Greenland; Running Time: 80 min
Our most basic understanding of the origins of life was recently turned upside down when Greenlandic scientist Minik Rosing discovered the first traces of life on Earth in a small fjord near Isua. His discovery predated all previous traces of life by over 300 million years. Life began in Greenland. But at the same time, its melting ice masses are accelerating day by day, and scientists around the world agree that it could drown our entire civilization if it is allowed to continue. The end of life will also start from Greenland. 
 
White Noise   
Director: Simon Beaulieu       
Country: Canada; Running Time: 77 min
A reflection on the fate of humanity in the Anthropocene epoch, White Noise is a roller-coaster of a film, a whirlwind of sounds and images. The fourth feature-length work by Simon Beaulieu, this film essay plunges viewers into a subjective sensory adventure—a direct physical encounter with the information overload of daily life. White Noisetransforms the imminent collapse of our civilization in the era of climate change and eco-anxiety into a visceral aesthetic experience.
 
 

SCIENCE NEW WAVE FEATURES

 
Burial  
Director: Emilija Skarnulyte    
Country: Lithuania, Norway; Running Time: 60 min
A python slithers and curls over the abandoned control room of Chernobyl’s sister, the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, its radioactive core an unleashed monster that will slither through time for a million years. From Etruscan ruins and sunken cities to the most modern of underground repositories, director Emilija Škarnulytė follows our attempts to bury the immortal. Addressing the epochal effects of nuclear technology on all levels, Burial follows the cycle of power, an eternal return, another serpent eating its tail.
 
Derek Changes His Mind     
Directors: Derek Dabkoski, Ian McClellan, Im Joong Kim     
Country: USA; Running Time: 78 min
Derek Dabkoski enrolls in a year long, double blind medical study of the effects of modified stem cell surgery to treat traumatic brain injuries in the hopes he might regain the function lost after the brutal mugging that left him partially paralyzed on his right side. What he discovers, ultimately, is that his commitment to improving his quality of life, shows him he has the strength to help his wife Nadia attain her US residency and raise their newborn daughter Carmen.
 
H6       
Director: Ye Ye           
Country: China; Running Time: 114 min
The Sixth People’s Hospital is one of the biggest in Shanghai. Its corridors are filled with medical staff, patients, and families whose lives have been turned upside-down. A series of interconnecting stories paint a picture of China as it is today, where hypermodernism meets cultural tradition. Confronted with life’s ups and downs, the sensitivity and sense of humor of the Chinese people emerges when least expected, helping them to find a sense of personal balance.
 
Helena from Sarayaku
Director: Eriberto Gualinga     
Country: Ecuador; Running Time: 70 min
Helena is a 17-year-old student in Finland. Her father is Swedish, and her mother is originally from the Kichwa people of Sarayaku, who live in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon. On a recent trip there, Helena participates in the traditional Uyantza Raymi cultural festival, and meets with Kichwa leaders who ask her to deliver a message to the world — Kawsak Sacha, or ‘Living Forest,’ an innovative concept in conservation, in which the jungle is considered to be a living being. After COVID-19 confines Helena in Puyo — the closest city to Sarayaku — she learns that 80% of her community has been infected with the virus, and that the Bobonaza River has flooded part of her village. 
 
Fire of Love   
Director: Sara Dosa    
Country: USA, Canada; Running Time: 93 min
Katia and Maurice Krafft loved two things — each other and volcanoes. For two decades, the daring French volcanologist couple roamed the planet, chasing eruptions, documenting their discoveries. Ultimately, they lost their lives in a 1991 volcanic explosion, leaving a legacy that forever enriched our knowledge of the natural world. Director Sara Dosa and the filmmaking team fashion a lyrical celebration of the intrepid scientists’ spirit of adventure, drawing from the Kraffts’ spectacular archive. Fire of Love tells a story of primordial creation & destruction, following two bold explorers as they venture into the unknown, all for the sake of love.
 
Into the Ice     
Director: Lars Ostenfeld         
Country: Denmark; Running Time: 90 min
Into the Ice is a journey of discovery to the vast masses of ice and the secret of our future that the ice harbouring. Director Lars Ostenfeld accompanies three of the world’s leading glaciologists on pioneering scientific expeditions to and INTO the Greenland ice sheet. Cool and hardworking Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, sensitive and politically engaged Jason Box, and daring and fearless Alun Hubbard are all working to collect new crucial data that can help us answer some key questions of our time: How fast is the ice melting? How quickly are sea levels rising? How much time do we have left to change the course of the Earth? 
 
Karmalink      
Director: Jake Wachtel           
Country: Cambodia; Running Time: 102 min
Conceived as a way to interrogate processes of neo-colonialism, and highlighting the alienating effects of technological progress, Jake Wachtel’s Karmalink is a mind-bending tale of reincarnation, artificial consciousness, and the search for enlightenment. In near-future Phnom Penh, the rich and privileged are augmented with nanotech, and new skyscrapers crowd the skyline. In Tralok Bek, a tight-knit community threatened with forced eviction, 13-year-old Leng Heng is having vivid dreams of his past lives. He and his friends are convinced they are meant to find a buried Buddhist statue to save their homes, and they seek out help from a street-smart girl in the neighborhood, Srey Leak. Together they follow clues across town and into the past, uncovering a link with a genius neuroscientist on a quest for digital nirvana. As Leng Heng’s dreams converge on the present, his very sense of identity begins to unravel. When it becomes clear that the stakes are higher than they imagined, the two friends must decide how far they are willing to go to find their treasure and the truth.
 
Letter from Yene       
Director: Manthia Diawara      
Country: Senegal; Running Time: 50 min
Letter from Yene emerges from conversations with the community in the seaside town of Yene, Senegal, where Diawara lives for part of the year. The area was traditionally and primarily occupied by fishermen and farmers but has in recent decades been besieged by coastal erosion and uncontrolled urbanization. Fish have become scarce and the pirogues, traditional fishing boats, cannot go far enough into the sea, so their owners have turned to new occupations. Modern fishing requires motorized boats and large nets made from non-biodegradable wires that become lethally entangled with purple coral, and human detritus, eventually washing up on shores like woven creatures of the sea. The women who used to smoke fish and preserve it as part of a sustainable mode of living now sell pebbles to the owners of the newly built houses. 
 
Maika: The Girl from Another Galaxy         
Director: Ham Tran     
Country: Vietnam; Running Time: 105 min
After losing his mother to illness and his best friend to an unexpected move, a young boy discovers a crashed spaceship and makes a new friend with awesome powers (although she does need a little help with her earthly social skills). Together, they embark on a zany, fun-filled adventure while taking on the bad guys and helping Maika find her way home.
 
Neptune Frost           
Directors: Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman     
Country: Rwanda; Running Time: 105 min
A group of escaped coltan miners forms an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective in the hilltops of Burundi. They soon attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime that’s exploiting the region’s natural resources — and its people.
 
Of Medicine and Miracles    
Director: Ross Kauffman        
Country: USA; Running Time: 95 min
At the age of six, Emily Whitehead was diagnosed with leukemia and the lives of her, and her parents were suddenly thrust into uncertainty. Through bracingly honest interviews and home videos, Of Medicine and Miraclesdetails her family’s experience bouncing from hospital to hospital, trying to stay hopeful amidst hopelessness, and their fateful correspondence with a doctor whose research could hold the key to her survival. But time is of the essence. 
 
Scales (Sayidat Al Bahr)      
Director: Shahad Ameen        
Country: Saudi Arabia; Running Time: 75 min
Set in a dystopian landscape, SCALES is the story of a young strong-willed girl, Hayat, who lives in a poor fishing village governed by a dark tradition in which every family must give one daughter to the sea creatures who inhabit the waters nearby. In turn the sea creatures are hunted by the men of the village. Saved from this fate by her father, Hayat is considered a curse on the village and grows up an outcast. Nevertheless, she does not surrender to this fate and fights for a place within her village. After her mother gives birth to a baby boy, Hayat must accept the brutal custom of giving herself to the sea creatures or finding a way to escape.
 
The Human Trial – Would you go first?      
Directors: Lisa Hepner, Guy Mossman          
Country: USA; Running Time: 92 min
In 2011, Lisa Hepner and her husband Guy Mossman heard about a radical stem cell treatment for diabetes, a disease that shockingly kills more than five million people each year. Driven by a desire to cure Lisa of her own type 1 diabetes (T1D), the filmmakers were given unprecedented, real-time access to a clinical trial — only the sixth-ever embryonic stem cell trial in the world. What follows is an intimate decade-long journey with the patients and scientists who put themselves on the line to be first.
 
The Invisible Extinction       
Directors: Steven Lawrence, Sarah Schenck
Country: USA; Running Time: 80 min
Superstar scientists Gloria Dominguez-Bello and Marty Blaser confront an international public health emergency – the loss of our ancestral microbes – while three patients with life-threatening diseases triggered by this disruption explore experimental treatments to save their lives. Most people think germs (another word for microbes) are bad for us, but what if they’re mostly good and wiping out the ones inside us is creating a health crisis that threatens humanity’s future? That’s the driving question behind “The Invisible Extinction,” a documentary film that follows globetrotting microbiologists Gloria Dominguez-Bello and Marty Blaser on their urgent quest to protect and restore our microbes before it’s too late. 
  
The Sacred Spirit (Espíritu sagrado)          
Director: Chema Garcia Ibarra           
Country: Spain, France, Turkey; Running Time: 97 min
Julio is dead. It’s terrible news for OVNI Levante, the association of ufology aficionados that he ran. The death hits one its members, José Manuel, particularly hard. Julio and he had a secret project to change human destiny. Now he must carry on alone. José Manuel and the other members of the ufology association Ovni-Levante meet weekly to exchange information about extraterrestrial messages and abductions. Julio, their leader, dies unexpectedly, leaving José Manuel as the only person who knows about the cosmic secret that could alter the human future. Meanwhile in Spain a search is going on for a little girl who disappeared some weeks before.
 
The Year of the Everlasting Storm
Directors: Jafar Panâhi, Malik Vitthal, Anthony Chen, Laura Poitras, Dominga Sotomayor, David Lowery, Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Country: USA; Running Time: 155 min
Seven stories from seven directors from around the world chronicle the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
Time Theorem (Teorema de Tiempo)         
Director: Andres Kaiser          
Country: Mexico; Running Time: 90 min
Years after the death of my grandmother Anita, I inspected the old building where she and my grandfather Arnoldo worked all their lives as printers. Among offset machines, accounting notebooks and paper envelopes smelling of mothballs, I found thousands of photographs and hundreds of home movies. The images not only revealed their secret profession as amateur filmmakers, but also related a line of painful family tragedies that marked the destiny of their existence.
 
Tigre Gente    
Director: Elizabeth Unger       
Country: USA; Running Time: 93 min
A Bolivian park ranger and a young Hong Kongese journalist risk their lives to go undercover and investigate a new, deadly jaguar trade that’s sweeping South America. Along the way, they grapple with questions of empathy, responsibility, and bridging a cultural gap to prevent the jaguar trade from spiraling out of control. Shuttling between the breathtaking biodiversity of Madidi National Park in Bolivia and the tense China-Myanmar border, 
 
Life Begins, Life Ends (Vida Comienza, Vida Termina)   
Director: Rafael Palacio Illingworth    
Country: Argentina, Switzerland; Running Time: 80 min
Argentinian poet Fabian Casas wrote that everything which rots forms a family. There are two families in this film, each mirroring the other, but time is not there to orchestrate a decomposition. When things end abruptly and unintentionally, they leave a void that resembles a cliff; a movement suddenly cut, like jumping off a spinning carousel and finding the stillness of the ground profoundly disorienting. 
 
Zoo Lock Down         
Director: Andreas Horvath      
Country: Austria; Running Time: 72 min
The zoo in Salzburg, Austria is open to visitors 365 days a year. In the spring of 2020, when the first Covid lockdown brought life almost to a standstill, the zoo had to close its doors to the public for the first time in its existence. Like actors in a theater, it is the animals at a zoo that attract the audience. Unlike actors the animals don’t play roles. They are just being themselves and their home transforms into a stage every day. When the paying visitors fail to appear because the spectacle is canceled, a unique opportunity unfolds for an intimate and at times surreal look at the zoo’s inhabitants.
 
 

NARRATIVE SHORTS

 
AFREET: Honeycomb Boom
Director: Omar Adnan Al-Nakib
Country: Kuwait; Running Time: 10 min
 
Bad Seed (Mauvaise graine)
Director: Nadège Herrygers
Country: France; Running Time: 12 min
 
Celebritas Ex Machina
Director: Joe Nicolosi
Country: United States; Running Time: 12 min
 
Coming Out with the Help of a Time Machine
Director: Naman Gupta
Country: United States; Running Time: 15 min
 
Diseases of trees (Las enfermedades de los árboles)
Director: Didac Gimenso Alfonso
Country: Spain; Running Time: 12 min
 
Further and Further Away (Chhngai Dach Alai)
Director: Polen Ly
Country: Cambodia; Running Time: 24 min
 
Haulout
Director: Evgenia Arbugaeva, Maxim Arbugaev
Country: United Kingdom; Running Time: 25 min
 
Pragma
Director: Ellie Heydon
Country: United Kindom; Running Time: 19 min
 
Sideral
Director: Carlos Segundo
Country: France; Running Time: 15 min
 
Spark
Director: Camille Hollett-French
Country: Canada; Running Time: 19 min
 
Suncatcher (Atrapaluz)
Director: Kim Torres
Country: Costa Rica; Running Time: 21 min
 
Teacher
Director: Xiaoting Zhong
Country: China; Running Time: 18 min
 
The Unveiled
Director: Andres Rovira
Country: United States; Running Time: 9 min
 
This Wild Abyss
Director: Thomas Mendolia
Country: United States; Running Time: 23 min
 
 

DOCUMENTARY SHORTS

 
A River of Winter (Un fleuve d’hiver)
Director: Félix Lamarche
Country: Canada; Running Time: 27 min
 
As We See (Como Miramos)
Director: Xavier Nueno
Country: Spain; Running Time: 22 min
 
Black Mayonnaise
Director: Nathan Kensinger
Country: United States
; Running Time: 9 min
 
Déversement (Release) 
Director: Baptiste Grison
Country: Canada; Running Time: 9 min
 
Dream of a Shadow (Work-in-progress)
Director: Peter Galison
Country: United States; Running Time: 20 min
 
Everything near becomes distant
Director: Yunyi Zhu
Country: France; Running Time: 22 min
 
Exhumed (Exhumados)
Director: Rodrigo Moreno Esquivel
Country: México; Running Time: 9 min
 
IEVA
Director: Vytautas Plukas, Domas Petronis
Country: Lithuania; Running Time: 14 min
 
Light of the Night
Director: Matej Pok
Country: Slovakia; Running Time: 40 min
 
Men of Salt (Hombres de Sal)
Director: Luis Armando Sosa Gil
Country: Mexico; Running Time: 14 min
 
NAYA (Der Wald hat Tausend Augen)
Director: Sebastian Mulder
Country: Netherlands; Running Time: 24 min
 
Nuisance Bear
Director: Jack Weisman, Gabriela Osio Vanden
Country: Canada; Running Time: 14 min
 
Quarries
Director: Ellie Ga
Country: Sweden, Portugal, France; Running Time: 40 min

The Ball in the Center
Director: Julien Lamy
Country: France; Running Time: 5 min
 
The Two Faces of Tomorrow 
Director: Patrick Hough
Country: United Kingdom; Running Time: 38 min
 
 

ANIMATION SHORTS

 
A Language of Shapes
Director: Samantha Moore
Country: United Kingdom; Running Time: 6 min
 
Anxious Body
Director: Yoriko Mizushiri
Country: France; Running Time: 6 min
 
Boobs (Lolos)
Director: Marie Valade
Country: Canada; Running Time: 7 min
 
Dreamer of a Final Theory
Director: Molly Murphy
Country: United States; Running Time: 1 min
 
Elena
Director: Birutė Sodeikaitė
Country: Lithuania; Running Time: 12 min
 
Imagination Blind: Aphantasia Explained
Director: George Lee
Country: United Kindom; Running Time: 1 min
 
It’s Raining Frogs Outside
Director: Maria Estela Paiso
Country: Phillipines; Running Time: 14 min
 
Of Wood
Director: Owen Klatte
Country: USA; Running Time: 7 min
 
Our Friendly Little Bugs (Nos Amies Les Petites Bêtes)
Director: Marie-Jo Long
Country: France; Running Time: 4 min
 
Patouille and the Parachute Seeds
Director: Inès Bernard-Espina, Mélody Boulissière, Clémentine Campos
Country: France; Running Time: 7 min
 
Shadow of the Butterflies (L’Ombre des papillons)
Director: Sofia El Khyari
Country: France; Running Time: 7 min
 
The Sprayer
Director: Farnoosh Abedi
Country: Iran, Islamic Republic of; Running Time: 9 min
 
There’s a Bison on The Prairie
Director: Morgan Miller
Country: United States; Running Time: 7 min
 
Virtual Voice
Director: Suzannah Mirghani
Country: Qatar; Running Time: 7 min
 
 

EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS

 
A Perfect Storm
Director: Karel Doing
Country: Netherlands; Running Time: 3 min
 
Aralkum
Director: Mila Zhluktenko and Daniel Asadi Faezi
Country: Uzbekistan, Germany; Running Time: 14 min
 
Aribada
Director: Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Natalia Escobar
Country: Germany; Running Time: 30 min
 
Bergtatt (Busy)
Director: Jan Otto Ertesvåg
Country: Norway; Running Time: 7 min
 
Biopixels
Director: sffe
Country: United States; Running Time: 4 min
 
Chaytu (Fantasma)
Director: Pavel Quevedo
Country: Costa Rica; Running Time: 7 min
 
Chemical Somnia
Director: Scott Portingale
Country: Canada; Running Time: 4 min
 
Cinegraffic Score 
Director: Tim Grabham
Country: United Kingdom; Running Time: 5 min
 
Constant
Director: Sasha Litvintseva
Country: Germany, United Kingdom; Running Time: 40 min
 
Diteggiatura
Director: Riccardo Giacconi
Country: Italia; Running Time: 17 min
 
Etat du Langage
Director: Camille Zisswiller, Nicolas Lefebvre
Country: France; Running Time: 13 min
 
Forests (Forets)
Director: Simon Plouffe
Country: Canada; Running Time: 16 min
 
Global Fruit
Director: G. Anthony Svatek
Country: United States; Running Time: 4 min
 
Hybrid Terrains
Director: Elise Guillaume
Country: Belgium; Running Time: 6 min
 
Interior Seis (Interior six)
Director: Mauricio Sánchez Arias
Country: Mexico; Running Time: 16 min
 
La Plage aux êtres
Director: Kendra McLaughlin
Country: France; Running Time: 20 min
 
Moonrise 
Director: Rowena Potts
Country: Australia; Running Time: 11 min
 
Nanoscapes
Director: Kristina Dutton
Country: United States; Running Time: 3 min
 
Off-Power
Director: Theodora Barat
Country: France; Running Time: 17 min
 
Places We’ll Breathe (Mjesta koja cemo disati)
Director: Davor Sanvincenti
Country: Croatia; Running Time: 21 min
 
Subserotic Bulge
Director: Flis Holland
Country: Finland; Running Time: 18 min
 
Terrain Vague
Director: Edward Kihn
Country: United States; Running Time: 48 min
 
The Empty Sphere
Director: Stéphanie Roland
Country: Micronesia, Federated States of; Running Time: 19 min
 
Wrought
Director: Joel Penner, Anna Sigrithur
Country: Canada; Running Time: 19 min
 
 

ABOUT IMAGINE SCIENCE FILM FESTIVAL 
Imagine Science FF is an annual science film festival in New York that debuted I 2008 and takes place all across the city in diverse venues, including cinemas, universities, and museums. The organization also hosts a series of satellite events worldwide and serves a major venue for the release of singular and bold works bridging the worlds of science and film. Imagine Science also seeks to challenge and expand the role of science in the current cultural discourse by providing a forum for adventurous interdisciplinary collaboration. A model of innovation, Imagine Science engages and fosters collaboration between art and science via its networking tool, Habitat, and its own streaming platform, Labocine.

 

About Liz Whittemore

Liz grew up in northern Connecticut and was memorizing movie dialogue from Shirley Temple to A Nightmare on Elm Street at a very early age. She will watch just about any film all the way through (no matter how bad) just to prove a point. A loyal New Englander, a lover of Hollywood, and true inhabitant of The Big Apple.

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