Microscopic Mysteries

A documentary of insect life in meadows and ponds, using incredible close-ups, slow motion, and time-lapse photography. It includes bees collecting nectar, ladybugs eating mites, snails mating, spiders wrapping their catch, a scarab beetle relentlessly pushing its ball of dung uphill, endless lines of caterpillars, an underwater spider creating an air bubble to live in, and a mosquito hatching.

Struggling with a mid-life crisis, Robert Oelman leaves his psychology career in the early 1990s to photograph rare and exotic insects. After moving from the United States to Colombia, he forms a special bond with his subjects in the Amazon rainforest. This connection enables him to make striking photographic images of new and undocumented species. After more than 20 years of traveling, searching, and photographing, his quest culminates with a New York City gallery show where he finally shares his images with the public.

City of Wax is a 1934 American short documentary film produced by Horace and Stacy Woodard about the life of a bee. It won the Oscar at the 7th Academy Awards in 1935 for Best Short Subject (Novelty). Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with the UCLA Film and Television Archive in 2007.

A scientist explains how the savagery and efficiency of the insect world could result in their taking over the world.

In this playful essay film, the filmmaker investigates our culture's discomfort with all things many-legged.

Vosička Aphelinus Mali

Insekten, Superhelden auf sechs Beinen

Shot at two cutting-edge research labs which specialize in the evolution of butterflies and moths, BIopixels is an animated short film exploring the world of evolutionary biology on the microscopic scale. The images - rendered from collections containing over 50,000 specimens - were take by microscopists over three years to create the animated shorts Nanoscapes and Biopixels. Both the animation and the score play with concepts of pattern, time, density and other means of development common to biological evolution.

Das große Insektensterben

A Documentary on the Creation of OVO, by Cirque du Soleil

UNIVERSUM cameraman Wolfgang Thaler and Bert Hoelldobler, a leading authority on ants, bring us face-to-face with the mysterious world of these social insects.

Ages before man proclaimed himself a superior being, the tiny ant had developed the art of agriculture — a practice which was later to be the backbone of human society.

Untangling the web of cultural and historical ties underlying Japan's deep fascination with insects.

A story about survival, belief in the physical memory of things, as if still-life was always part of the scientific possibility or of the nightmare of extinction.

The World's Biggest and Baddest Bugs, follows host Ruud Kleinpaste, as he embarks on an entomological odyssey around the globe in search of the ultimate biggest and "baddest" creepy crawlies. The World's Biggest and Baddest Bugs will then profile the "stars" of the show, with Ruud explaining in his audience-friendly style exactly what makes them so amazing.

This documentary focuses specifically on insects. Giving you an unbelieveably up close and intimate view of the many unique secrets of the bug world. Answering scientific questions on how and why they have evolved certain bizarre adaptations, whilst using stunning imagery never seen before.

La vispa Teresa (“Lively Theresa”) is based on a well known song; a girl, ten, catches a butterfly and all the other insects intervene to save it.

Shot with a microscope, we follow a few hours in the lives of doomed pond microbes as they are each decimated by a growing air-bubble.

Insecticide, mon amour

Luis Buñuel’s observation – “You can find all of Shakespeare and de Sade in the lives of insects” – was the inspiration for this experimental horror movie, in which human actors wordlessly enact the life-cycles of wasps and bees. Its purpose is to depict with emotion, humor and unnerving specificity an alternative society that really exists and has nothing to do with human beings. A highly stylized depiction of nature in all her deceitful glory.