InScience 2024: program complete
International Science Film Festival Nijmegen is back with 59 films about science that make us look differently at the world around us. This year’s central theme is ‘Language’. The ninth edition will take place from March 12 to 17, 2024. The main location of the festival is LUX Nijmegen. This year, InScience is again presenting in-depth Talks, discussions, experiments and art installations.
For six days, InScience will show the most impressive science films of the past year on a big screen, including no fewer than 36 Dutch premieres. Films about the most diverse subjects: from light pollution to sign language. Films about what it means to be altruistic or what social involvement does to us.
Best science films of last year
For example, InScience is showing the documentary Eternal You. This Dutch premiere delves into the world of start-ups that try to bring the dead back to ‘life’ by creating avatars of the deceased with AI. In Surfing Einstein, which is having its world premiere at InScience, Italian physicists dance to represent their major scientific breakthrough, whirling through their own offices and laboratories. In Join or Die we follow Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam on his search for solutions for a democracy in crisis.
36 films from the festival program will be shown in the Netherlands for the first time. In !Aitsa we follow how a gigantic radio telescope is built in the South African Karoo desert. What does this cosmic hunger for knowledge do to the people who have inhabited this country for centuries? The Arc of Oblivion questions why humans are so determined to leave a mark on Earth. The filmmaker’s quest starts with building an ark in a field in Maine, with which he hopes to safeguard the archive of his own life.
InScience’s homegrown exhibitions include Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59, undoubtedly the most dazzling experience of the festival. A unique film made with military computer technology from the 1960s.
And with NetherLENS, InScience also presents no fewer than seven homegrown short films. From documentary to dance film and from animation to evolutionary biology: this is a program with many flavors.
Opening
The festival opens on March 12 with a special ‘Brainlanding’. At the Nijmegen Donders Institute, a few kilometers from the festival, a test subject will watch film fragments in a brain scanner. Brain scientist Peter Hagoort will analyze brain activity live in the cinema. The opening film is the Dutch premiere of Guardians of the Formula, a thriller set in 1950s Yugoslavia that mixes Cold War politics with medical history.
Theme program ‘Language’
The theme program of this edition focuses on language. Language is at the core of our culture, it allows us to understand the world around us. This year, InScience explores the possibilities of AI and language, conducts research into the evolution of gestures, learns about stuttering during the Stuttering Hour and laughs at coal English with TikTok phenomenon Double Dutch. As theme guests, ‘conlangers’ David & Jessie Peterson will give this year’s Big Ideas lecture. They create languages for series and films, such as this spring’s blockbuster: Dune: Part Two. How do you actually give meaning to an invented language?
Junior program
There is a special junior program for the youngest visitors. This year we will delve into various language experiments, such as code or secret language. On Saturday, March 16, we will organize all kinds of exciting language experiments together with Kletskops. Afterwards, the children can relax at the film screening of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982), also accessible to adult children. On Sunday, March 17, we celebrate science with ‘Meet the Researcher’ with all nominated research for the Klokhuis Science Prize 2024.
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