| Festival Theme: HYBRID Transgenics. Cybernetics. Interdisciplinary cross-pollination. The Imagine Science Film Festival was created in the hybridization of art and science and mixing subjects, genres, and even fact and fiction, is still at the core of all of our interests. And so, with our tenth anniversary festival this October we return to our omnivorous origins while seeking new recombinatory forms of the future. We're looking for your chimeric docufictional laboratory science fictions, your combinatorial data reenactment ballets, your interspecies cellular diaries, your greatest and most surprising HYBRIDS. | |
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Friday, October 13
FIRST LOOK!
A chimeric feature-length anthology film by ten international filmmakers exploring hybrids in all forms and featuring stories from the most influential scientists of our time.
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7:00 - 9:30 PM
Tishman Auditorium,
The New School
Tishman Auditorium,
The New School
Nika Šaravanja & Alessandro d'Emilia, Italy, 2016, 60 min
U.S. PREMIERE
U.S. PREMIERE
Film as immersive auditory travelogue, seeking the voices of species whose calls may all too soon fall silent due to habitat loss and other anthropocene effects.
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9:30 - 11:00 PM
Rubin Museum of Art
Rubin Museum of Art
Saturday, October 14
Short Film Program
The quickest path to insight is not always a straight accounting of the facts. Here at ISF, we often move outside the traditional real/unreal categories formed by scientific documentary and science fiction, and this is doubly true in this hybrid year. This is not to minimize the crucial importance of scientific accuracy, but to consider that a complicated reality may require the complex approaches of docufiction.
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Networking + Discussion
Film distributors and filmmakers provide the nuts and bolts of developing, shooting, and distributing interdisciplinary films that incorporate science providing rapid fire talks followed by Q&A and mingling. Guest speakers and tables will include Nautilus, Aeon, HHMI, Science Friday, Labocine, Science/AAAS and many more. Come prepared to ask questions and network. And don't forget your business cards!
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Short Film Program
Searching sea turtles, avenging sea monsters, and philosophical frogs all meet in the latest year of our ongoing Science for Nanos series of sci-films for kids. This year the program focuses on our place in the changing biosphere of Earth, but we also couldn't resist looking beyond, into particles, planets, and the scientific method in space.
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2:00 - 3:30 PM
NY Hall of Science
NY Hall of Science
Short Film Program
A wide-angle travelogue across the planetary surface, Analytical Landforms examines our physical reality through ecology, geology, climatology, and even microbiology. But is this the present anthropocene Earth, or have we traveled somewhere more exotic? Look closely enough at our planet, and it may become indistinguishable from science fiction.
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3:00 - 5:00 PM
The New School
The New School
Performance and Short Film Program
Live-edited experimental documentary? Movement across species and national boundaries? The spiritual aspects of sound? All of these, and more, will intersect in an evening of ritual, cultural identity, and migration like nothing we've ever attempted in the first 10 years of the Imagine Science Film Festival. A truly hybrid program, the night will mix film, performance, and music.
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7:00 - 9:00 PM
National Sawdust
National Sawdust
Feature: Híbridos
Vincent Moon + Priscilla Telmon, 2017, France / Brazil, 90 min
FEATURE FILM PERFORMANCE
FEATURE FILM PERFORMANCE
Live-edited experimental documentary? Movement across species and national boundaries? The spiritual aspects of sound? These themes and more converge in the second half of the evening, when we'll move into an immersive feature film performance by artists Vincent Moon and Priscilla Telmon.
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9:30 - 11:00 PM
National Sawdust
National Sawdust
Sunday, October 15
Short Film Program
In the vast production-system of the anthropocene, resources must constantly be gathered and transformed for consumption, with bi-products disposed of in turn. Energy must be harnessed, commodities produced and shifted, results dealt with or released back into the wild. A semi-dystopian portrait.
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Workshop on the bank of the Hudson + Biobase Harlem
In collaboration with Columbia University and Biobase/BioBus, ISF will be conducting its 3rd science filmmaking workshop with Biobase students. This workshop with include a trip to the Hudson River looking at specimens with scientists and filming findings they explore in the water and under the microscope. With guidance from ISF and Biobase staff students will break into groups and produce short films and GIF's about science discoveries in the in their New York City backyard.
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1:00 - 3:00 PM Biobase Harlem
Short Film Program
We all want to be healthy, but we have a lot left to figure out. Continuing uncertainties breed a constant barrage of advice, scientific or subjective but how does anyone sort it all out? The films in this program won't all necessarily help you to do so, but explore the confusion of questions and contradictions we must live with. True or false, every medical opinion tells us something about humanity.
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3:00 - 5:00 PM
The New School
The New School
Live Score & Film Performance
Performance is integral to much of film, but rarely is it a performance in itself. An evening of exploration of the possibilities of expanded cinema through live editing and music.
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9:00 - 11:00 PM Made in NY Media Center by IFP
Monday, October 16
Short Film Program
Following last year's Optic Nerves program, we return to Spectacle Theater with another selection of the most thrillingly bizarre of the year's scientific fictions and experiments. This year's program focuses on copying glitches and mis-recollections: forgotten faces, genetic errors, holographic tourism, unstable computer graphics, and hazy VHS memories.
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7:30 - 9:30 PM Spectacle Theater
Talks & Screening
Join this year's Symbiosis contestants for a public presentation of works-in-progress at the mid-point of the competition. Get an inside look at the collaborations.
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8:00 - 10:00 PM Bowery Poetry Club
Feature: Frozen May
dir. Péter Lichter, 2017, Hungary, 72 min
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
1990, after the fall. Alone in the ambiguous tension and beauty of deserted natural landscapes, a survivor seeks someone lost to 16mm memories. This is a post-apocalyptic story reimagined as unsettled mood and creeping doubt, unfolding slowly over increasingly psychological landscapes, with only a broken Commodore 64 as witness and narrator.
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10:00 - 12:00 PM Spectacle Theater
Tuesday, October 17
Discussion
At the NYU Production Lab, we gather with young filmmakers to discuss how they collaborate with scientists. Does this collaboration with scientists and labs around the world affect the format and genre of a film - from documentary to fiction to animation. Learn about the upcoming projects from our 4 special guests.
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6:00 - 8:00 PM NYU Production Film Lab
Wednesday, October 18
Film Program
Joining two mid-length films on significant historical developments in thought, this program examines the lenses through which we view the biological sciences. First, we'll delve into the innovations of Anton van Leeuwenhoek that first opened the microscopic world to captivated eyes in the 1670s. Then, jumping three centuries forward, we'll come to Niles Eldridge, who in 1972, proposed, along with Stephen J. Gould, the punctuated equilibrium refinement of evolutionary theory, launching a debate that continues to this day.
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Feature: Photon
dir. Norman Leto, 2017, Poland, 107 min
U.S. PREMIERE
U.S. PREMIERE
Photon is nothing less ambitious than a summary of all existence from the origins of matter to the entropic dissolution of the universe (along with human life, past, present, and future). It's also an extraordinary challenge to preconceptions of the science documentary, merging rigorously researched data with subjective and irrelevant writing that forces the viewer to question the assumed monolithic authority of the narrator. Is any film expressing fallible human ideas really more of a documentary than the wildest sci-fi speculation? Decide for yourself.
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7:00 - 9:00 PM Cobble Hill Cinemas
Short Film Program
The most increasingly relevant hybridization facing us as we approach the technological singularity may be that of humans and computers. The forms this may take have been the source of endless conjecture: cyborgs and cybernetics, government by artificial intelligence, the dystopian reliance on our devices that has already overtaken so many lives. In these films, we'll explore a few of the possibilities.
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9:00 - 11:00 PM Cobble Hill Cinemas
Thursday, October 19
Interactive VR/AR and Panel Discussion
Discover how the latest technologies will help us tell new science stories in the near and far future. Panel starts at 7 PM. Demos at 8:30 PM.
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7:00 - 10:00 PM Cooper Union
Friday, October 20
Feature: Honey, Rain and Dust
Nujoom Alghanem, 2016, United Arab Emirates, 86 min
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
A unique ethnographic and ecological look into an unseen corner of the Arabian Gulf: honey finding traditions of the northwestern mountains of the United Arab Emirates.
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4:00 - 6:00 PM American Museum of Natural History
Films, Awards, Performance, and Reception
How do organisms benefit or harm each other? When are our biological interactions mutualistic cooperative, or parasitic? On closing night, we will explore the question of "What is Symbiotic Life" with six films from the 2017 Symbiosis competition and a special talk with science journalist Carl Zimmer. We will end with a singular performance by artist-scientist-perversionist Nieto.
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8:00 – 11:00 PM Caveat
The Venues
