Labocine

"Body, remember…" directed by Matthew Berka. The lens of the camera is a key to the senses and the sensual. The close-up renders tactility inviting touch, the obscured image tests the boundaries of the frame beckoning one to enter. But as all the senses are awakened, the lens of the projector relays a distance that cannot be collapsed. #bodies #labocine

OPEN CALL — JUNE ISSUE BORDERS Submission Deadline: May 20 Submit via Labocine Film Submission [link above] Borders define and divide. They separate, contain, protect — but also reveal, contrast, and give form. A border is never neutral. It marks a threshold: between inside and outside, self and other, signal and noise. For our June issue, we invite films that explore borders across scales — biological membranes, political frontiers, cultural lines, perceptual limits, ecological thresholds, invisible systems. What happens at the edge? Where does one system end and another begin? Can a border be porous, unstable, generative? We are looking for works that examine how borders are drawn, enforced, resisted, dissolved, or reimagined. Films that engage contradiction: separation and connection, violence and transformation, definition and possibility. From cells to nations, identities to ecologies, visible lines to unseen boundaries — we welcome experimental, documentary, hybrid, scientific, poetic, and speculative forms. We also invite visions that move beyond the border entirely: fragile, utopian, impossible, or emergent ways of living without edges. #borders #opencall #labocine #sciencenewwave #experimentalfilm

May is here. Body Atlas unfolds on Labocine—where bodies and environments echo, overlap, and transform one another. Over 100 films from the Science New Wave. 🧬 A new issue tracing shifting forms and shared terrains. Surfaces become passages. Boundaries soften. Organs echo territories, tissues suggest terrain, and gestures trace invisible routes through lived space. Across these works, scales collapse and expand—what is held within begins to mirror what surrounds. This is not a fixed map, but an unfolding cartography—where bodies and environments continuously inscribe one another. #bodyatlas #sciencenewwave #labocine #experimentalfilm #filmcuration #artscience #movingimage #cinema

"Movies/Medical1" directed by Albert Bayona. It is part of the “Movies” series, produced between 2014 and 2018 The first thing that caught my attention in the film “How to Turn the Eyelid Inside Out” (1948), produced by the London Institute of Ophthalmology, was the opening shot of a woman with pale, slightly rosy skin and a round face, the attention drawn by her gaze to her large eyes, accentuated by the sparse presence of light-colored eyelashes contrasting with the color of her black hair, which matched her austere dress, revealing her slender neck. The scene continues, with the figure of the doctor in a white coat entering the frame as the woman sits in the patient’s chair, giving way to a succession of shots of hands examining the eyelid, until reaching a close-up of the fingers turning the eyelid using the various methods of eversion. Despite the elegant staging, the film’s color palette, the smooth transitions, and the exquisite fades to black—in the face of such a marvel of classical audiovisual language—the reaction of most viewers would be one of aversion, even though they know no cinematic techniques have been used to provoke such a rejection; the contradiction is present, generating perceptual misunderstandings. #eyelid #eyelids #bodies #labocine

"Landscape with Sick Child" directed by Matthew Berka. A film-poem made after Gerald Murnane’s short story ‘The Battle of Acosta Nu’ (1985), about the aftermath of a failed Paraguayan socialist colony founded in 1912 called New Australia. Murnane’s unnamed narrator, a displaced Australian descendent living in Paraguay, is beset by his son’s dire physical illness. His concern for his son’s life is matched only by his own mental fixation to communicate the secret meaning of his true homeland from which he can never return to. Landscape with Sick Child searches for a new set of audiovisual signs that unravels this psychogeographic illness, embodied only when landscape is set against landscape and brought together by rhythmic passages of reverberating, disparate sounds and images. #landscapes #bodies #labocine

"Enamel" directed by Anamaria Tatu. The Mouth as Landscape presents fractured human tooth fragments under the microscope. At this scale, enamel becomes cliff, pulp chamber becomes cave mouth, crystalline dentin becomes translucent glaciers. The familiar body part dissolves into something geological and vast. Teeth are sites of pain, memory, and mortality - first lost, then filled, eventually extracted. At the microscopic scale, their compromised structure becomes a landscape of its own logic. By removing the tooth from any recognisable bodily context and rendering it at landscape scale, the work destabilises the viewer's sense of proportion and orientation, an invitation to following the contour of fracture lines. Read more and watch it here: /films/enamel-2026 #mouth #bodies #labocine

"Primary Organs" directed by Michael John Whelan. A meditative journey along the shores of the Persian Gulf and deep under its waters. 'Primary Organs' intertwines diverse but connected vignettes from historic and contemporary maritime cultures of the Arabian Peninsula: a diver travels to sites once visited by Jacques Cousteau during his 1954 survey for oil, an abandoned pearl diving village built from coral is a site of simultaneous archaeological exploration and restoration, and retired fishermen sing endangered songs once used to add rhythm to their work. Central to the film is the representation of coral as an eco-marker of our interspecies dependency: the marine biologist keeps samples alive in a laboratory aquarium, a village is built entirely from it, and as a votive gesture a diver brings a piece of it to a former oil survey site. Through its slow-paced language and choreographed underwater scenes, Primary Organs explores local relationships to the sea, echoes of petro-state neocolonialism, and the roles of complicity and gesture within our climate crisis. Punctuating this journey is the voice of the marine biologist who shares her poetic observations and trepidation for the future. #primaryorgans #bodiesbodiesbodies #labocine #persiangulf

"Visio Cordis" directed by Sophie Hamacher. What does it mean to see the heart? The film Visio Cordis takes medical imaging as both subject and provocation, tracing how systems built to observe and measure do not merely reveal the body, but shape how care and rupture are interpreted. At its center is Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or broken-heart syndrome: a condition triggered by emotional or physical stress, diagnosed predominantly in women, in which the heart briefly balloons into an unfamiliar form. Named after Japanese octopus traps, it offers a morphological language for what exceeds diagnosis—a body that shapeshifts under pressure. The film asks what is lost or obscured when intimate biological experience passes through the lens of technology, and what a poetic intervention reveals about who sees and who feels, lingering in the gap between image and experience. #brokenheart #bodies #labocine

"Trivakra" directed by Sofia Angst. The flash of a childhood memory, its childish body, the beginning of its molecular transformation. Audiovisual artist Sofia Angst creates an entrancing experimental self-portrait with real-time image manipulations, using webcams and digital microscopes, breaking through the boundaries of identity. A rhythmic navigation between bodily and audiovisual glitches, between rituals of hormonisation which glitch the software and decompose figures and standardisations. #bodies #labocine #molecular

"Teeeeth" directed by Fanfan Zhou. Teeeeth is a short film shot on 16mm that examines the role of human teeth in the context of contemporary diets. #teeth #labocine #bodies

"Fractura" directed by Dóra Mikus. Short experimental film about anticipatory grief and my brother’s upcoming orthognathic surgery through the anatomy of the human body. #anatomy #bodies #labocine

"There Are Tides in the Bodies" directed by Sabīne Šnē. Water has been shaping our existence for as long as there has been an "us" to speak of. It is everywhere and always in motion. Planetary waters and the waters within human bodies merge and mingle, dissolving boundaries between species and ecosystems, and impacting both human and non-human worlds. 'There Are Tides in the Bodies' explores these fluid connections by weaving together stories of the Baltic Sea with ideas from hydrofeminism, which higlihts that water is in all of our bodies and through that we are connected with each other and with the planet. Film traces the path of a water molecule—from cloud to sea, through the human body, and back into the atmosphere. It's a micture of 3D animation, fragments filmed through microscope exploring worlds in a water samples from the Baltic Sea, and filmed materials from the seaside. Read more and whatch it here: /films/there-are-tides-in-the-bodies #water #bodies #balticsea🌊 #labocine