The official poster for this year’s festival{credit}Imagine Film Festival{/credit}

Imagine Science, a yearly affair where art meets science, is returning for a second edition this February in Abu Dhabi. The festival uses film and visuals as attractive artforms to communicate hot topics in science, and attempt to express the discipline’s marvels and complexities to a general audience.

The festival, which will be held at the Arts Centre in New York University Abu Dhabi between February 18 and 20, will showcase a series of short feature films and documentaries, open to the public, with access to Atmospheres, a sci-art exhibit.

The first edition last year brought a myriad of scientific narratives to the screen, with a strong focus on water insecurity, a very pressing issue in the Arab region. The festival’s founder, NYU Abu Dhabi biology professor Alexis Gambis, came up with the idea after he felt motivated to challenge the way scientists and science are depicted in visual media, through deconstructing and humanizing the scientific process, and those who take part in it, and by showing people how science is embedded in their daily lives.

Last year’s edition opened to a full house of audience and the movie Watermark, meditating on water as a source of life and worship.

This year, the organizers of the festival are promising even richer material, that according to Gambis, “will probe into the world around and above us investigating ecological balance, climate change, extraterrestrial life and dreams through documentary, fiction, and scientific data.”

Everything about Imagine Science is meant to fascinate the audience with science’s reach into every facet of life, including entertainment, beginning from the scheduled experimental opening-night musical program where a musician will use what he terms a “Weather Warlock”, a drone synthesizer of his invention that translates the weather into musical sounds to the much-anticipated screening of Ice and the Sky, directed by Luc Jacquet of March of the Penguins fame. Ice and the Sky artfully tells the story of French glaciologist Claude Lorius whose work has arguably shaped our modern understanding of climate change.

Lined up are also a series of talks, panel discussions, workshops and performances that straddle a line between art and science. Among the exciting pre-festival programs is Field Work: Middle East, where filmmakers in or passionate about science present their visual experimentation, and The Student Film Lab, a film-making competition among UAE high school students partial to science.

Nature Middle East will be in attendance, providing full coverage of the Emirati edition of the festival.