Making Babies

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.

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?

Samuel L. Jackson narrates this audiovisual presentation of a never-finished manuscript by the eminent American writer and activist James Baldwin. This stirring history of the struggle of African-Americans against white supremacy is presented from the perspective of disbelieving amazement that such a thing could have ever happened and is actually still ongoing.

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

The film Almost Nothing presents a behind-the-scenes look at CERN, the Center for Nuclear Research. Through interviews with theoretical physicists, technicians and other employees, the everyday operations of the organization and its cafeteria are revealed while discussing the most important questions about the universe that science is currently engaged in. 

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.

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 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.

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.

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. 

Cinecittà, the “city of film” on the Tiber River, produced over 300 films for Mussolini and gave the people a galaxy of film stars. This documentary combines historical facts with fictional testimony by acting icons to conjure up an image of the Italian factory of dreams as a product of propaganda and capital, as well as reveals the relationship between fascism and Hollywood.