How do technology and art bring us closer to understanding the world? The Science New Wave Festival kicks off its 17th year with the U.S. premiere of a film that gets to the core of why we’re here. Deftly intertwining a history of computation with a broad survey of experimental cinema, physicist and filmmaker Mark Levinson explores how experimentation in film and science together reshape our ability to represent and comprehend the universe at its most fundamental level.

Join us Friday, October 18 to kick off the festival in the Museum of the Moving Image's aptly futuristic Redstone Theater.

Following the screening, we'll dig even deeper with a conversation between director Mark Levinson, and two of the many creators who appear in the film, filmmaker Erin Espelie and IBM's Director of Research Dario Gil, moderated by neuroscientist Heather Berlin.

The Universe in a Grain of Sand (Mark Alan Levinson | United States | 2024 | 73 min) U.S. PREMIERE

Birds have cultural and scientific meanings without number. They populate our myths and metaphors, they teach us about evolution, language, and magnetic navigation, they serve as indicators of a shifting biosphere and climate. Films in this program dance around these subjects and into others: signal degradation in the printing of Audubon color plates, the links between natural history sample collection and colonialism, the Persian story of the Simurgh, and the challenges of light pollution. As ever, the lightness of feathered flight escapes simple categories.

Followed by a conversation with filmmaker Erin Espelie.

Gavia stellata (Sea Mew Set with Stars) (Erin Espelie | United States | 2023 | 3 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE
As Far as the World Reaches (Daniel Frota de Abreu | Brazil / Netherlands / Belgium | 2024 | 27 min) U.S. PREMIERE
Next Her Heart (Anna Kipervaser | United Arab Emirates / United States | 2023 | 12 min)
Puffling (Jessica Bishopp | UK / Iceland / United States | 2023 | 20 min)

TRT: 62 min

In geologic time, or even compared to our longer-lived neighbors, horseshoe crabs and coelacanths, humans have existed on Earth for but the blink of an eye. Our outsized effect notwithstanding. We'd like to imagine we will be here forever, but in our stories, we fantasize our own destruction. These are not disaster films, however, they merely envision the lives and landscapes that outlast us. Animals band together outside the human world, a de-extinct mammoth reflects on the extinction of homo sapiens, tectonic plates shift, and a trio of burros investigate a fully automated observatory, continuing to consult the cosmos long after we've gone.

Followed by a conversation with filmmakers Yusuf Demirors and Wendi Yan.

Perfectly a Strangeness (Alison McAlpine | Canada | 2024 | 15 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE
Touch the Water (Yusuf Demirors | United States | 2023 | 8 min)
Archipelago of Earthen Bones (Malena SzlamAustralia / Chile / Canada | 2024 | 20 min)
Tale of the Mammoth Goddess (Wendi Yan | United States | 2023 | 8 min) WORLD PREMIERE
Lick A Wound (Nathan Ghali | France | 2024 | 25 min) EAST COAST PREMIERE

TRT: 76 min

An amateur archaeologist obsessed with electronic waste records images and sounds for ten years, as part of an intuitive investigation. As he shapes a personal, playful and musical diary, he travels the world tirelessly, trying to decipher what his findings hide and how he might interpret them. One day, in a workshop recycling electronic objects, a strange revelation happens. From that moment on, his search takes an unexpected turn and, following the trail of a ghost poet, new questions appear. As time goes by and new ruins accumulate, the archaeologist sees his cat named Pendrive grow up and asks him: "Dear friend, how will history be written in the future? Who will write it?"

Thus, between absurdity and darkness, the archaeologist will try to understand the current state of technology and its link with memory, in times of environmental crisis and overproduction.

The New Ruins (Manuel Embalse | Argentina | 2024 | 90 min)

Preceded by a hyper-detailed animated story of Japan's now-vanished river otters, in the dreamlike waste-scapes of the Anthropocene:

Kawauso (Akihito Izuhara | Japan | 2023 | 15 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE

TRT: 105 min

How does an intrepid film make its way, through jungles of images, seas of sound, and often years of conceptualizing and production, to the screen? In partnership with DCTV, we're excited to present Science New Wave Field Notes, an exclusive glimpse into the production process with a few of our favorite filmmakers, and even scientists working with video. The event also serves as preview launch of the latest new feature from our sister-site Labocine, which will now allow the incorporation of filmmaking Field Notes directly into film pages, allowing viewers a deeper dive into fascinating work. Much of the labor of filmmaking -- hours of experiments, outtakes, and test footage, not to mention scrapped scripts, endless interview transcriptions, and deep research into tangential leads -- ends up invisible in the final creation. This night of film talks, and Labocine's Field Notes hereafter, offer a glimpse of some of that hidden wealth.

The event will wrap up with a reception, so grab a drink and catch up with some of the filmmakers, meet other members of the Science New Wave, and make plans for your next cinematic expedition. This will serve as our opening party!

*Note: The cinema's entrance is around the corner on White Street between Lafayette and Centre Streets.

The possibility of extraterrestrial visitors is one of science fiction's most enduring subjects. Within the Science New Wave, aliens take on additional meanings. They're the seeds that stow away in imported wool, mysterious audio signals, the otherworldly microscopic creatures that we share our living spaces with (by the untold billions), the scientists who contend with Earth's overbearing gravity to study us in turn. "The Aliens" reconfigures the trope through direct film experimentation, documentary, and dance.

We Are Not Alone (Adebukola Bodunrin | Canada / USA | 2023 | 11 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE
A Body Called Life (Spencer MacDonald | US / Poland / Switzerland | 2024 | 15 min)
The Wool Aliens (Julia Parks | UK | 2023 | 28 min) U.S. PREMIERE
EarthWorm (Philip Barker | Canada | 2024 | 16 min) U.S. PREMIERE

TRT: 70 min

If any other sci-fi subject can rival alien visitors in the popular imagination, it's time travel. As with the prior program, a familiar trope is here fragmented into new and illuminating facets. Travelers from the future search air quality disasters of the past for insight into their own time or become fascinated by the minutia of contemporary life. Scientists probe soil and water to reconstruct and simulate cities long-since swept away. Familial memory intertwines with history. And market speculators hope to sleep, in cryogenic stasis, until ill-considered investments deliver dividends in some distant future.

The Veiled City (Natalie Cubides-Brady | UK | 2023 | 13 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE
Testerep (Vincent Langouche | Belgium | 2024 | 16 min) U.S. PREMIERE
1976: Search for Life (Tess Martin | The Netherlands | 2023 | 11 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE
for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world (Gala Hernández López | France | 2023 | 19 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE
terrae sidera (Giulia Grossmann | France | 2023 | 8 min) U.S. PREMIERE

TRT: 67 min

What can plants tell us? They signal nutrient content of soil and water, they speak from scientific history in the rich tradition of botanical illustration, they may even be able, without a trace of an animal's nervous system, to sleep, even dream. In this program we'll see the fine structures of grasses applied directly to 16mm film, investigate the secret interiors of insect galls, seek the botanical truth of myth, and consider the challenges of representing the complicated organic forms of flowers. If we listen, we may even hear a monologue from a murderous tree.

Followed by a conversation with filmmakers Ruth Lichtman and Sharon Shattuck.

Parallel Botany (Magdalena Bermudez | United States | 2023 | 11 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE
Oxygen (Karel Doing | UK | 2023 | 6 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE
Algorithms of Beauty (Miléna Trivier | Belgium | 2022 | 21 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE
Decoding Ancestral Knowledge (Ruth Lichtman & Sharon Shattuck | United States | 2023 | 10 min) EAST COAST PREMIERE
Direction of the Road (Janelle VanderKelen | United States | 2023 | 8 min)

TRT: 56 min

Stones are at once the most foundational and the most overlooked parts of our lifeworld. When a retired nature documentary narrator passes a kidney stone, she decides to tell one more story about this forgotten world of stone. A hypnotic essay film asking urgent ecological questions, Apple Cider Vinegar takes the viewer on a journey across the globe, meeting forensic chemists, passionate geologists, Palestinian quarry workers, and those who still live on the lava fields of Fogo. Along with a few stops to take in the miniature dramas forever unfolding on networked nature cams.

Don't be fooled by the unassuming title. With wit and grace to spare, this is a film about, well, everything.

Apple Cider Vinegar (Sofie Benoot | Belgium | 2024 | 80 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE

Preceded by an unexpectedly land-bound whale, and a conversation with filmmaker Patrick Hough:

Whale Fall (Patrick Hough | Ireland | 2024 | 16 min) INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE

TRT: 96 mins

A poetic portrait of contemporary wildlife conservation, JUST ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH reflects on empathy, agency, and the role of hope in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. This debut nonfiction feature examines scientists and citizen scientists who conduct surveys of frogs, which serve as an indicator species; study sea stars threatened by disease; track bats whose populations have been decimated by white-nose syndrome; and collect data on insects declining at unprecedented rates. Set primarily at night, the film weaves together observational and lyrical sequences, texts written by authors including W.S. Merwin and Adam Nicolson, and an otherworldly soundscape. JUST ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH is a visceral, sensory meditation on what it means to live in a broken world.

Followed by a conversation with filmmaker Marianna Milhorat.

Just Above the Surface of the Earth (For a Coming Extinction) (Marianna Milhorat | Canada / United States |2024 | 69 min)

Preceded by a richly animated consideration of a scientist's encounter with the sixth extinction as it plays out elsewhere:

The Waiting (Voker Schlecht | Germany | 2023 | 17 min)

TRT: 86 min

In 2020, New York City's weather was formally reclassified by the US National Climate Assessment. Long considered to exist within a coastal temperate climate, the city is now in a humid subtropical climate zone, complete with the unpredictable afternoon thundershowers and sweltering nights we experienced throughout June and July of this year. But steamy summers and snowless winters are the least of our troubles if the trend continues unopposed and polar ice sheets continue to shrink. This program traces the contours of approaching disaster, in millennia-old ice core samples, personal tragedies, traditional rituals, and dystopian streaming media. Climate change may not be a foregone conclusion but the modern energy landscape is painfully resistant to change. We close then, knowing full well that the idea of the "carbon footprint" was designed by petroleum companies to shift blame from the system to the individual, with a bleakly sardonic reflection on personal consumption and responsibility.

Followed by a conversation with filmmaker Lucia Lambarri Barberis.

The Lost Season (Kelly Sears | United States | 2024 | 7 min)
Eventual Horizon (Elise Guillaume | Belgium / France | 2023 | 10 min) U.S. PREMIERE
In the Ice, Everything Leaves a Trace (Christoph Oeschger & Gianna Molinari | Switzerland | 2022 | 13 min)
I Walk While Glaciers Melt (Lucia Lambarri Barberis | Peru / UK | 2024 | 9 min) WORLD PREMIERE
Schlafsand (Elias Bötticher | Switzerland | 2022 | 14 min) U.S. PREMIERE
3MWh (Marie-Magdalena Kochová | Czech Republic | 2024 | 12 min) U.S. PREMIERE

TRT: 65 min

Join us for an intimate glimpse into the Sci-Art collaboration process with this year's six Symbiosis teams! Hear from all scientist-filmmaker pairs, view clips of works in progress, and lend your own voice to the conversation about how to work through production challenges!

Without the sun, life as we know it on Earth could never have developed. With it, we'll all be consumed in another five billion years when it surges outwards into the red giant phase of its life. These opposing forces of the sun, creative and destroying, recur throughout this program of experimental sun studies: in U.S. thermonuclear tests in Marshall Islands which harnessed star-like nuclear fusion reactions, in Croatian astronomical animation, in alchemical study of an artist harnessing fire in Appalachian mountains, and in abstract Chilean science fiction. At last, we turn instead to the influence of the moon, in a luminously imagined tale of intersecting lives on the night of an eclipse.

Followed by a conversation with filmmaker Jean-Jacques Martinod.

Two Suns (SUPERFLEX | Denmark | 2024 | 15 min) U.S. PREMIERE
Salute to the Sun (Darko Masnec | Croatia | 2022 | 9 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE
The Hollow (Jean-Jacques Martinod & Bretta C. Walker | United States | 2022 | 15 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE
estrelladistante (Celeste Rojas Mugica | Chile / Spain | 2023 | 14 min) U.S. PREMIERE
Coral (Sonia Oleniak | United States / Poland | 2023 | 18 min)

TRT: 71 min

Why does the uniquely cinematic language of film editing work? In real life we don’t instantly jump from one viewpoint to another. Such a bizarre disruption would be nauseatingly jarring. And yet, film viewers effortlessly understand, and don’t even notice, most edits. This has led to the suspicion that film editing exploits some universal features of human perception – that a well-edited film is an illusion that mirrors our window upon the world.

Film editor Walter Murch, scholar David Bordwell and a handful of eminent psychologists present this compelling portrait of the profound “naturalness” of film editing. But in the remote mountains of Turkey, a budding researcher – alongside a group of people who have never seen films – puts this deepest of cinematic ideas to the test.

The Cinema Within (Chad Freidrichs | United States | 2024 | 93 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE

A time-travelling Android from the future seeks the Last King to record his beautiful voice which will deliver existential answers to the machines of the future. It’s the year 2022 and the King is about to sing. Preparations for a Miracle is a sci-fi documentary about our exploitation of nature and machines, seen through the eyes of a time-travelling Android, who interprets everything wrong. Or so it seems.

Preparations for a Miracle (Tobias Nölle, Switzerland, 87 min, 2024) U.S. PREMIERE

Preceded by:

A natural history fantasy film, following the dramatic lifecycle of the wild salmon in human form, with narration by Marianne Faithfull.

Wild Summon (Karni Arieli, Saul freed, United Kingdom, 15 min, 2023)

Vital signals arrive and depart constantly at every scale. Information enters us through our eyes and ears and olfactory systems, as well as other senses we're still in the process of inventing. At the cellular level, biochemical messages are shuttled, though a complex dance of proteins, across the lipid membrane, perhaps to trigger a cell line to differentiate. At larger scales, we seek signals from farther out, as satellites collect data and beam their messages back to Earth. But beware of the signals you receive from social media: they might just melt your eyes.

Followed by a conversation with Crazy Lotus producer Maenum Chagasik.

Interfacing (Daksha Patel | UK | 2024 | 7 min) WORLD PREMIERE
Jizai (Maiko Endo | Japan | 2024 | 15 min)
Re-Entry (Ariel Mahler | United States | 2024 | 16 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE
Crazy Lotus (Naween Noppakun | Thailand | 2024 | 15 min) EAST COAST PREMIERE
Toti (Maëlle Chevallier | Switzerland | 2024 | 6 min) U.S. PREMIERE

TRT: 59 min

A live 16mm film performance documentary by Jennifer T Reeves!

Sixty years ago, a 30-year-old waitress and single mother, was persuaded to engage in psychotherapy sessions on film, with three of the most influential Theorist-Psychologists of the 20th century. Reeves newest dual-projection film breaks down and expands the seminal film series Three Approaches to Psychotherapy with an intricate superimposed montage consisting of material from Gloria’s unguarded sessions and numerous film artifacts of her lifetime: newsreels, home movies, commercials, a beauty pageant, cold war propaganda, and educational films from the 1930s-1970s.

The Gloria of your Imagination immerses audience members in an unabashed patriarchal, nationalistic era which many U.S. conservatives are working tirelessly to recreate. Social and legal limitations of that era, which formed Gloria and the struggles of her generation, remain unacknowledged in the sessions. While the therapists seem progressively non-judgmental about Gloria’s active sex life, there is no mention that contraceptives are actually illegal for her to take. Reeves’ original intertitle script fills in missing context and introduces Gloria’s greater life and self: from her Polish-Catholic upbringing to marriage straight from high school to an ever-evolving single parent on a spiritual journey, living by her own principles, until an untimely death at 46 years of age.

By projecting films that Gloria could have seen in their original 16mm format, on top of portions from Gloria’s psychotherapy sessions, viewers absorb the culture of that era directly. Original 16mm shot by Reeves, and footage doctored with her signature direct-on-film techniques, bring about viewers’ subjective experiences and visceral connections to Gloria’s inner experience. The “three Glorias” put on display by therapists with vastly divergent methods and conclusions, are displaced by the Glorias viewers experience, and perhaps by the courageous and determined individual imagined by the filmmaker.

The Gloria of your Imagination (Jennifer T Reeves | United States | 2024 | 96 min) EAST COAST PREMIERE

In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, ‘Preemptive Listening’ is an ode to the sirens that are and those that could be. Siren compositions from over 20 contemporary musicians form a resonant voice to ask; Does an alarm have to be alarming?

Preemptive Listening (Aura Satz, United Kingdom / Finland, 82 min, 2024)

What are the precise means by which scientific inquiry is conducted?

The Drosophila fly is a perfect model for life in the laboratory, mass-produced to mass-produce knowledge. It lives, dies and loves in the cylinder of a plastic tube.
In a larger box, in a research centre for animal behaviour, humans conduct astonishing experiments with these insects.

Witnessing these experiments, our perception of these familiar animals is gradually transformed.

Animal Model (Maud Faivre & Marceau Boré | France | 2024 | 51 min) U.S. PREMIERE

Preceded by two other views into process:

In Praise of Darkness (Adrián Balseca | Ecuador | 2024 | 17 min) U.S. PREMIEREPREMIERE
Log from Site A (Marina Dewinara Luccioni | United States | 2022 | 7 min) U.S. PREMIERE

TRT: 75 min

Dreams are a yet-incompletely-understood realm of inspiration and anxiety. But these films are less about the mechanisms of dreams themselves than about the possibilities that open from them. A pea plant, under anesthesia, dreams of history, invasive seeds shed in a coliseum and of its role in 19th century taxonomy. Dreams connect a constellation of forces related to the modern industrial landscape and threats of climate change. A close study of the marks we leave transforms the commonplace. And hovering between life and death, dreams spool out an irrational and ever-shifting landscape of beauty and unease. This is an invitation to hypnagogic worlds.

Followed by a conversation with filmmaker Su Rynard.

Surface Séance (Michael Heindl | Austria | 2024 | 5 min) U.S. PREMIERE
The Everlasting Pea (Su Rynard | Canada | 2024 | 17 min) U.S. PREMIERE
Know Your Stones (Katarina Jazbec | Germay | 2023 | 21 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE
In Dreams (Josh Shaffner | United States | 2023 | 17 min)

TRT: 60 min

In a just-barely-future of AI zoo optimization and VR dating apps, sensible Estonian teen Mia is still figuring out her future when her American friend Grete comes to visit for a summer at the lake and things take a turn for the weird. Drawn along by the desire to play it cool with her older friend, she's pulled towards not exactly drugs but an experimental mindfulness headset that might probe even more mind-altering. But why are two officers from Interpol in town to track it, and what does it have to do with the benevolent robotic chicken at the Tallinn Zoo?

Following up from surreal prior features Crumbs and Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway, director Miguel Llansó here constructs a slightly more traditional narrative with meatier themes, but without giving up his inventiveness. Ultimately it's tethered by a strong lead performance that keeps the wildest turns of the plot from ever feeling unrelateable. With a score from pioneering electronic composer Laurie Spiegel.

Infinite summer is a techno-psychedelic coming of age story that draws as much from the teen summer canon as it does from classic sci-fi mind-benders in order to construct a very contemporary interrogation of transhumanism, the unchecked global tech economy, and the desire to find one's place in the universe.

Infinite Summer (Miguel Llansó | Estonia / Spain | 2024 | 90 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE

Preceded by an even more psychedelic plot to reach our lost companion animals beyond the veil:

The Rainbow Bridge (Dimitri Simakis | United States | 2023 | 13 min)

TRT: 103 min

Several professional actors and non-actor professionals portray a dynamic of human-nature relationship around one of the most active stratovolcanos in the world, Indonesia's Mount Merapi. In the shadows of recent eruptions, these actors play out a story that is written together by the people who live there, including a volcanologist, a sand miner, and a mystic—people who have a close bond with the mountain, illustrating fiction and nonfiction situations that could and would have happened in Merapi. As the volcano waits, and tremors shiver along its slopes, tensions spark between scientists, locals, and the shadowy paramilitary forces that lurk in the jungle.

As the central conceit of the film connects the imminent natural destruction of the volcano with the intensity of the human lives that play out around it, viewer discretion is advised. (Content warning: violence, sexual and otherwise.)

Monisme | Riar Rizaldi, Indonesia / Qatar, 115 min, 2023

A double feature of two mid-length pieces that gather data to construct political arguments and prise apart historical narratives constructed of faulty data.

The Diary of a Sky unfolds an atmospheric symphony of violence over Beirut, revealing the haunting fusion of incessant Israeli military flights and the hum of generators during blackouts. This 45-minute video essay plunges viewers into a chilling chronicle of daily life transformed by the weaponization of the air, where the terror of repeated incursions becomes a disconcertingly banal backdrop.

My Want of You Partakes of Me interrogates digestion as the fundamental condition for being in the world, a process of physiological, psychological, spiritual, literary and political dimensions. Multiple storylines trace the poetics of incorporation as a matter of metamorphosis and decay, the philosophy of matter and imperial conquest, industrialization and annihilation, poetry and parenting, love and citation.

The Diary of a Sky (Lawrence Abu Hamdan | Lebanon | 2024 | 45 min) NEW YORK PREMIERE
My Want of You Partakes of Me (Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner | UK / The Netherlands | 2024 | 54 min) U.S. PREMIERE

TRT: 99 min

Scientists, environmentalists, indigenous activists, and miners reflect upon the spectral, fog-swept expanses of Colombia's páramo ecosystem, a unique region of the high Andes that feeds its major rivers and was the site of a hazardous crossing by Simón Bolívar in the war for independence 200 years ago. La Laguna del Soldado retraces The Liberator’s journey across the high-altitude marshlands while searching for glimpses of his ghost still present in this historically contested territory. Reflecting on the construction of historical narratives and their environmental repercussions, La Laguna del Soldado traverses the living and elusive archive of the páramo, navigating through the dense fog suspended between Simon Bolivar’s past and Colombia’s present.

The Soldier's Lagoon (Pablo Alvarez Mesa | Canada / Colombia | 2024 | 75 min)

Be the first to see the films of this year's weeklong Art-Sci collaboration in the Symbiosis Competition. Learn more about Symbiosis 2024 - participants, rules of the game and more.