Tips for students

Mark Levinson | Documentary | US | 90 min | 2019 | tickets

Claude Shannon is an overlooked genius that introduced the notion of a ‘bit’ and laid the foundation for the information age. He developed a mathematical theory of juggling, created a unicycle without pedals, wrote the first article about chess-playing computers, built a machine that can solve a Rubik’s Cube and manufactured a flame-throwing trumpet. The Bit Player tells the inspiring story of a visionary who discovered the application of the binary code and who never lost his childlike curiosity.

Adam Bolt | Documentary | US | 94 min | 2019 | tickets

The biggest technological revolution of the twenty-first century is not digital, but biological. CRISPR-Cas has given us unprecedented control over the basic building blocks of life: DNA. It opens the door to curing diseases, reshaping the biosphere, and designing our own children. It is man playing God. But how will this new power change our relationship with nature? Do we understand the consequences? What will it mean for human evolution? It’s up to us to decide how far we’re willing to go.

Alex Gibney | Documentary | US | 119 min | 2019 | tickets

Elizabeth Holmes left Stanford in 2004 to start a company that would launch a healthcare revolution. In 2014, her company Theranos was valued at $9 billion, making Holmes the youngest female billionaire in the world, akin to the Steve Jobs of healthcare. Just two years later, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Theranos with fraud, causing the company to collapse. This is the fascinating story of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal, portrayed by director Alex Gibney through never-before-seen footage and insider testimonies. With all of the drama of a real-life heist film, this documentary explores how this could have happened and who was responsible.

Pailin Wedel | Documentary | US, TH | 75 min | 2019 | tickets

Einz is a two-year-old girl from Bangkok who lost her battle with brain cancer. She is also the youngest person to ever be cryogenically frozen at the request of her Buddhist parents. Their oldest son, fifteen-year-old whiz kid Matrix, explores whether science can one day help his sister Einz to be reborn. Hope Frozen follows the family, who hope to experience her rebirth in a new body.

Marcus Lindeen | Documentary | SW, DK, US, DE | 98 min | 2018 | tickets

The Raft is an award-winning documentary about a floating human laboratory. The experiment saw five men and six women of various backgrounds drift across the Atlantic on a raft for 101 days. Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés was inspired by the experiences he had during a plane hijacking and devised this scientific project in 1973 to study the relationship between aggression and sexual attraction in humans. What was intended as an experiment ultimately resulted in a theatrical reality show. As a group experiment, The Raft shares similarities with The Stanford Prison Experiment.

Nicolas Pariser | Fiction | FR, BE | 104 min | 2019 | tickets

Roberta Grossman | Documentary | US, PL | 86 min | 2018 | tickets

Who Will Write our History tells the story of historian Emanuel Ringelblum and Oyneg Shabes, the secret archive about Jewish life in the Warsaw ghetto that he helped to establish. With 30,000 hand-written pages, photos and posters, the Oyneg Shabes archive is the most important collection of eye-witness accounts of the Holocaust. Under Ringelblum’s guidance, journalists, scholars and Jewish community leaders defied their enemy with the ultimate weapon: the truth. They risked everything to make sure their archive survived the war, including their lives.

Maartje Nevejan | Documentary | NL | 92 min | 2019 | tickets

Where do you go when you’re not here? What image does the fearful and misunderstood experience that children and young people have during an absence seizure conjure up? While brain researchers claim there is no consciousness during an absence seizure, filmmaker Maartje Nevejan was inundated with strange images and sensations during her episodes. In the poetic documentary Are You There? Nevejan explores the strengths and limitations of the human imagination and combines personal stories and scientific findings with the work of artist Anish Kapoor.

Todd Douglas Miller | Documentary | US | 92 min | 2019 | tickets

Apollo 11 is the sensational cinematic take on the days and hours in July 1969, when astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to step foot on the Moon. The documentary includes footage from never-before-seen 70 mm film and more than 11,000 hours of audio recordings. This spectacular retelling, fifty years after the moon landing, takes you back to that historic mission. It not only changed the lives of the three international heroes, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, it also changed the world. As Armstrong said in his now-famous one-liner: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”