The Science New Wave Fund provides support to singular film projects that challenge and expand the role of science in the current cultural discourse and celebrate adventurous interdisciplinary collaboration across disciplines. The SNW Fund is supported by the Brandt Jackson FoundationEach SNW-supported project also receives a distinct SNW DNA certificate, alongside the 64 films selected for this year’s Science New Wave Festival.
Each of these SNW luminaries was awarded a Science New Wave fund to support their research, development, production, post-production, and distribution. Our aim is to accompany these works as they evolve, expand, and reach audiences worldwide.These project range from shorts to features, hybrid films, live performances, installations, and series, all at various stages of development. You can explore their film pages, dive into the field notes, and witness how these works evolve, grow, and take shape. We’re excited to be part of this journey and can’t wait to showcase them on the platform!
Secret Herbs / The Quickening by Melissa Ferrari
This experimental documentary performed with live animation and magic lanterns, within the tradition of scientific lantern lecture, will illuminate the historical context and evolution of medication abortion. This documentary will include an overview of these histories of abortifacients, which include surprising stories on the ubiquity and moral acceptance of abortion in many regions and times.
Secret Herbs / The Quickening
Nickeland by Pedro de Filippis
In Nickeland, within the bustling heart of Brazil's Goiás state, Júlia and Aldair, dedicated veterinarians from the Animal Rescue Group (GRABH), struggle to revive a canary within their ambulance's confines. Their efforts symbolize a broader mission to provide on-the-spot aid to animals across South America. Amidst the urban sprawl, mining activities meld seamlessly into the landscape, epitomized by a protest banner labeling the locale "Ammonialand" at the mining complex's entrance.
Nickeland
Spirit In The Grid (Brick Walled World) by Edem Dotse
Spirit In The Grid is a site specific installation and performance piece which attempts to explore notions of degradation, technological obsolescence and the reclamation of abandoned spaces by nature. The piece is framed around the coming-of-age story of a teenage boy and his relationship with two role models in his life: an ingenious electronic repairman and a practicing naturalist, and will consists of filmed material highlighting the narrative portions of the story with a multiscreen visual installation in an abandoned greenhouse in a botanical garden, and performance involving circuit-bent obsolete audiovisual technology including modded CRT televisions and cassette players.
Brick Walled World
When The River Split Open by Jess X. Snow
On a visit to their industrializing ancestral homeland, a rebellious Chinese-American escapes their over-protective maternal family to find the truth about their estranged father–whose legacy was entangled with the first species of dolphin driven to extinction.
When The River Split Open
The Great Silence by Reka Bucsi
The mysterious early return of four astronauts from Venus coincides with increasingly strange phenomena on Earth, as the sun refuses to set and everyone wonders if this could be the beginning of the end.
The Great Silence
Everything Must Go by Jesse McLean
This film explores grief and loss through a variety of subjects—a cemetery surrounded by shopping malls, a plastic-free laboratory, a hoarder's unopened online purchases, and the sudden death of a loved one. It delves into what humans hold onto and what we cannot let go of.
Everything Must Go
LiMONi by Liesbeth De Ceulaer
LiMONi is a hybrid documentary-fiction film that takes place in the not-so-distant future, and tells a futuristic story with real people, existent places and current day events. In 2038, everything in Brussels looks the same, but a few things are gradually more noticeable different. Temperatures and rental prices have risen and drinking water has become an even more valuable commodity. Matte is a non-binary person (they/them), can’t afford a permanent place of residence, and has increasingly vivid dreams about a lemon grove.
LiMONi
Memoirs of Vegetation by Jessica Oreck
A bite-sized animated series about plants that have changed the course of history. Each episode presents an enticing kernel of botanical intrigue and how it has shaped the world as we know it. This pilot first episode delves into the salubrious uses and nefarious misuses of castor beans throughout history. Each following episode will address a different species and their influence. Possible future episodes include Cotton, Bananas, Chili Peppers, Vanilla, Coffee, Pineapples, Cocoa, Tobacco, Apples, Sugar cane, or Asparagus.
Memoirs of Vegetation
Certain Portions of Matter by Mike Gibisser
Certain Portions of Matter is a hybrid film that creates a manifold portrait of physicist Albert A. Michelson, whose experiments are cited as those which led to the disappearance of the luminiferous aether, a postulated cosmological medium necessary to explain the propagation of light, prevalent in the physics community through the early 20th century. Beginning as an adaptation of the existing biography The Master of Light, written by Michelson’s daughter (Dorothy Michelson Livingston), the film will transform over the course of its run-time into something more speculative, blending historical research, reperformance, fictional, and auto-fictional elements in order to construct a layered essay wherein the aether is explored in its historical context and simultaneously as an actual substance and metaphor for loss, both personal and environmental.
Certain Portions of Matter
Untitled grief and hope project by Elise Guillaume
Can loss help us look towards the future? Centered around the Arctic, Untitled grief & hope project parallels my personal experience of grief with the psychological impacts of climate change, by intertwining personal introspection with scientific research.
Untitled grief and hope project (work-in-progress)
The Cave Without a Name by Jessica Bardsley
The Cave Without a Name is an intersectional ecofeminist film exploring nocturnal forms of resistance to 24/7 capitalism. In dialogue with Black feminist theory, Indigenous cosmologies, and activist histories, The Cave Without a Name takes viewers on a journey from a dystopian world of light pollution, overwork, and sleeplessness, to an appreciation of night and nocturnal life as reservoirs of resistance and healing.
The Cave Without a Name
Dreams of Prophets by Gala Hernández López
A theater director, tormented by constant nightmares, starts doing research about the history of dream engineering technologies and becomes interested in an American start-up, Prophetic, which has designed a device to induce lucid dreams using artificial intelligence. In parallel, the woman rehearses with performers testimonies of historical figures who played a role in the history of the technoscientific control of dreams: magnetized women such as Agent Inconnu and the Seeress of Prevorst, the Soviet architect Konstantin Melnikov or the French Baraduc and Darget, inventors of “mental photography”. The dreams of all of them are hallucinated by an AI.
Dreams of Prophets
