Popular Science L-8-5

Advances in artificial intelligence are accelerating at a breakneck pace. A journalist connects these innovations to the changes they bring to our daily lives. A documentary that makes it easy to understand these technological upheavals.

Riding Giants is story about big wave surfers who have become heroes and legends in their sport. Directed by the skateboard guru Stacy Peralta.

Supersonic: The Great Adventure

Documentary which follows the construction of a trailblazing 36,000-tonne steel structure to entomb the ruins of the nuclear power plant destroyed in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

A series of static shots of the buildings of the California Mission system, as they existed in 1907. Because many of the Mission buildings were in poor states of repair in 1907, director Norman Dawn uses glass shots, a technique where paintings are applied to a sheet of glass placed between the camera and the objects being photographed, in order to restore roofs and walls that had been destroyed.

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.

Forty years after the death of Pierre Mendès France, Yves Jeuland and Alix Maurin reveal another side to this figure: the story of his life, told through the pages of his private notebooks. PMF led a romantic and extraordinary life as a French politician and Jew, both loved and hated.

Capturing the Electrons documents the life and career of Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian physicist Ferenc Krausz. His research team has generated and measured the first attosecond light pulse and used it for capturing electrons' motion inside atoms, marking the birth of attophysics. In 2023, jointly with Pierre Agostini and Anne L'Huillier, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

From award-winning director Phil Grabsky comes this fresh new look at arguably the world’s favourite artist – through his own words. Using letters and other private writings I, Claude Monet reveals new insight into the man who not only painted the picture that gave birth to impressionism but who was perhaps the most influential and successful painter of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite this, and perhaps because of it, Monet’s life is a gripping tale about a man who, behind his sun-dazzled canvases, suffered from feelings of depression, loneliness, even suicide. Then, as his art developed and his love of gardening led to the glories of his garden at Giverney, his humour, insight and love of life is revealed. Shot on location in Paris, London, Normandy and Venice I, Claude Monet is a cinematic immersion into some of the most loved and iconic scenes in Western Art.

Yollotl connects the past and the present through a love story inspired by Mesoamerican mythology and testimonials from children who live in the Mayan rainforest. A story in Nahuatl and a ritual song accompanies the journey through the interior of ancient trees to the universe.

Every weekend, seventeen year old Chris and his family hunt rabbits during sugarcane field burning and harvesting in the Florida Everglades. The film records a tradition by which migrant farm workers in the communities surrounding Lake Okeechobee have been hunting and preparing rabbits since the early 1900s.

The inspiring story about the professional rock smasher Clive Tapps. A devoted man who plans to fulfill his dream, to smash the biggest rock he has ever faced.

The World Parade: Palestine

September 3rd, 1939. Britain and France declare war on Nazi Germany, only two days after the Wehrmacht invades Poland. This day, the sad date when the fate of the world changed forever, the Phoney War began: eight months of uncertainty, preparations, evacuations and skirmishes.

The Spanish journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales (1897-1944) was always there where the news broke out: in the fratricidal Spain of 1936, in Bolshevik Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, in occupied Paris or in the bombed London of World War II; because his job was to walk, see and tell stories, and thus fight against tyrants, at a time when it was necessary to take sides in order not to be left alone; but he, a man of integrity to the bitter end, never did so.

Isolated in Mexican South Baja California desert, exciting and fragile, rancher´s life is showed by amazing as unknown characters.

South Florida is under siege from a new invasive species. This time, they're man-eaters, African Rock Pythons. These lethal giant constrictors are one of nature's most aggressive snakes.

Fear and fascination arise in Muriel Grey when she remembers the figure of her father, who passed away when she was still very young. Thirty years after his death, Muriel will tell us the story of José Carlos Grey, a Black Holocaust survivor, freedom fighter in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance, and one of the only Black men known to have been imprisoned at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

Two unhoused men turned community leaders— John and LaMonté —organize their neighbors in the face of displacement, addiction, and a failing social system.

Private Diary documents photographer Pedro Usabiaga working with a variety of amateur models. The audience sees how the relationships between the photographer and the subjects changes during their time together, as well as how the individual photographs begin to take shape. Pedro Usabiaga is a well-established Basque photographer whose chief concerns are figurative photography and whose passion in photographing the Spanish male. In this hour long conversation with the artist we are given entry into that process of selecting models (none of the models he uses for this book to be titled 'Private Diary' are professional, but instead are randomly chosen as Usabiaga observes athletes in action) and then allowed to follow Usabiaga and his crew as they photograph these men in natural settings and natural light.