Making Babies

During Young’s interference experiment, electrons behave differently when they are being observed. Working with this axiom of quantum physics, the filmmaker set out to explore aspects of the human consciousness that cannot be described by science. Along the way, the question arose: Does water communicate when people don’t see it?

A mixture of documentary and live action film, The Bit Player is a multilayered portrait of Claude Shannon, the man who invented the word “bit” to describe a unit of information and whose scientific work laid the foundations for IT and artificial intelligence. Through interviews with members of the scientific community, archival footage, and reenactments, the film presents the life and professional story of this forgotten genius who, in addition to his groundbreaking discoveries, also produced numerous strange and useless inventions and enjoyed juggling and cheating at games of chance. The film shows Shannon’s theories and technical ideas using animations easily understood by everyone. "Claude Shannon should be a model for everyone in any creative field. He never lost his child-like curiosity. Sometimes it revolutionized the world; sometimes it made a flaming trumpet." M. Levinson

Dominique Batraville, a Haitian poet, journalist and actor, sits in his modest abode and reads. After a minute, he lies and continues in reading. This slowly narrated but impressive documentary presented his person to us by static, often detailed shots, combined with his own monologues and quotes from others.

A fantastic epic. A nationalist construct. Ideal for taking a selfie. A bunch of paint on a canvas that belongs on the junk heap. Anachronism. A transcendental experience. Working with the playfulness of the cinematic medium, the filmmaker takes us on a tour of the serious world of art, and gives voice to a theorist, an art restorer, a philosopher and a Japanese fan of Mucha.

Armed with an ancient microscope invented in the 17th century by textile merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the filmmaker travels through her native Brussels exploring everything she can get her hands on. The long series of subjective macro-details of strange shapes is accompanied by citations from van Leeuwenhoek’s letters.

An essay study on the possibilities of combining sports and film. Using traditional French film theory and philosophy, the director analyzes the sports performances of American tennis legend John McEnroe captured on 16mm film. The film offers a contemplation on the relationship between duration (durée), the passage of time, and motion.  

A group of fifteen scientists head for Antarctica where they’ll spend 13 months, during which time they’ll study the skies from the best place on the planet. The film diary of one of the team members reveals glittering plains of snow, black nights full of stars, as well as isolation, frustration, and the longing to escape back to civilization.

Every day, Vandana Verma travels across the face of Mars, taking pictures of its surface – all the while never leaving a NASA laboratory in Pasadena, California, from where she controls the Curiosity rover. This engrossing essayistic documentary joins her and other experts in space research in meditating over images of a planet located tens of millions of kilometers from Earth. Mars thus becomes the ideal place for studying our paradoxical relationship to photographs and for contemplating whether images from space (or also from various places on our planet) present us with reality or whether they actually create an alternate reality that we should approach far more cautiously. “Martian imagery reveal as much about our relationship to images as they tell us about Mars itself. This film aims to make the spectral quality of. an image materialize in front of us.” M. Långström

Film theorist André Bazin yearned to shoot a film about the churches of the French province of Saintonge. Several decades later, Pierre Hébert presents a reconstruction of Bazin’s dream in an animated documentary film that is also a philosophical meditation on the relationship between architecture and cinema. 

A look at the integration of machines into daily life. On the one hand, robots are very useful; on the other, they replace people’s jobs and can even threaten their lives. The film is a montage of interviews with workers and various specialists, and shows footage from places where robots are used on a regular basis. 

Camorra is an Italian criminal organization operating in Naples and all throughout Campania. Its rapid expansion from initial smuggling to powerful organized crime mobs that trade drugs, weapons, and people has also influenced how the entire city and region evolved. The film edit uses contemporary film footage, news television reports, police photographs and newspaper headlines to depict the lives of the people there, the practices of criminal mob bosses and the overall atmosphere of the city. In this way, it delivers an exceptional comprehensive film report on one of the most powerful mafia organizations.  “Camorra is set in a specific historical moment, late 60s – early 90s, to convey not only emotions and information in a non-didactic manner, but to use the past as a mirror of the present as well.” F. Patierno     

In fictional sequences inserted into this documentary about economic, social and political perspectives on possible upcoming developments, the filmmakers portray a utopian future as a foreign territory. Six public figures from various cultural and social circles reflect on the future as a matter of time, people and the world.