Imagine Science Films announces today Imagine Science Abu Dhabi 2018, presented by The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi and taking place March 8th - 10th. This interdisciplinary festival celebrates science and art through three feature films, two short film programs, a science-art gallery exhibition'Hybrid Futures'.

The film festival and science-art exhibition will take place at NYU Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island campus and is open to the public. The Hybrid Futures Exhibition is free. Tickets to the festival will be available mid-February at nyuad-artscenter.org.

In its fourth year, Imagine Science Abu Dhabi continues exploration of the global intersection between art and science. Kicking off with opening night feature Jane, a personal and deeply inspiring celebration of scientific field research and the life of groundbreaking primatologist Jane Goodall, this year's festival will continue to explore the human experience and its intersections with the natural, medical, and technological worlds.

The personal-scientific thread continues with Friday night feature Unrest, which follows filmmaker Jennifer Brea's own struggles with and search for treatment for the little-understood condition of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and culminates with Saturday night's closing film, director Michael Almereyda's science fiction Marjorie Prime, which explores Alzheimer's Disease and plausible artificial intelligence scenarios in the near future in order to turn a technological mirror on the complexities of memory, love, and familial relationship.

These themes will be developed further with two afternoon short film programs mixing documentary and fiction film from the UAE, the Gulf, and beyond. On Friday, Fragile Lives, featuring Jim Savio's Tabiib and four other films, bridges themes of family and health to study the sometimes precarious state of human existence. On Saturday, Hybrid Creatures, which opens with an expedition to Mars complete with a live musical performance, brings together all of our themes in seven films that explore the interrelations of humans, animals, and technology. Together, this year's films shed light on what it means to be a member of homo sapiens in the 21st century.

Additional Festival Highlights

Hybrid Futures Exhibition
All sci-art is a hybrid proposition, a cross-pollination of aesthetics and information, the visual and the intellectual. In the Hybrid Futures exhibition, five international artists working in film, virtual reality, and illustration will take this concept further, exploring cutting-edge zones of sci-art catalysis to better assess the present and future state of the human and natural worlds. This exhibit will take show throughout the entirety of the festival at The Project Space on NYU Abu Dhabi campus.

Student Film Lab
The Student Film Lab is a science film workshop to teach local middle schoolers the essentials of science storytelling and filmmaking. After gathering camera phone footage on a scientific theme, students will be given a crash course in editing software. The competition prompt this year is 'Hybrid Creatures'.