The amazing theme films of InScience 2020

Marcus Vetter | Documentary | DE | 92 min | 2019
This documentary offers a unique behind-the-scenes look at the World Economic Forum (WEF). Each year, political, business, and academic leaders from around the world travel to the Swiss town of Davos to attend the WEF. In Das Forum, we follow the 81-year-old founder and economist Klaus Schwab on his mission to improve the world through dialogue. Never before in the fifty-year history of the Forum has an independent camera crew been granted access to this impressive conference. Can the world really be saved through talking alone?

Douglas Trumbull | Fiction Film | 89 min | 1972
Environmental awareness became a common issue as early as the 1970s. Silent Running is one of the first Hollywood productions to address this theme. This sci-fi cult classic greatly influenced later scientific experiments by revealing a future in which all botanical life on Earth has gone extinct. Only a few plant specimens have been preserved on spaceships. When ecologist Freeman Lowell is ordered to destroy the last of the gardens to save costs, he cannot do it. Together with his robots Huey, Dewey and Louie, he hijacks one of the spaceships and flees to keep the valuable last bits of green alive.

Alan Ereira | Documentary | CO | 89 min | 2012
High in the Columbian mountains, the Kogi – protectors of the world – sound the alarm: Aluna, ‘The Great Mother’, is in danger. They break their usual isolation and approach British documentary-maker Alan Ereira to warn the modern world, who they invariably call ‘Younger Brother’, that we are destroying the Earth. What follows is a journey through nature in which the Kogi attempt to share their knowledge with scientists before it’s too late.

While a pandemic may seem like a thing of the past, new diseases are cropping up all the time, many of which are transmitted from animals to humans. But what if there are diseases that should have been eradicated long ago? Each year, roughly 200,000 are diagnosed with leprosy, a disease that can be treated with medication and that can only be transmitted from person to person. Toine Pieters, a history of science professor, decided to research this. Together with a team of scientific heavyweights, he went in search of the origins of the leprosy bacteria in Suriname. Filmmaker Boris Everts documented the expedition.

De Kennis van Nu tells the story of this remarkable expedition that yielded new insights into the transmission of leprosy. Perhaps the lessons learned can help us combat new diseases, such as the novel coronavirus.