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Filmed in Ireland, on some of the world’s most violent coastlines, Dark Side of the Lens profiles a surf photographer who takes to the waves looking for ‘little glimpses of magic’ to record for posterity. The job may sound glamourous, but it’s a dangerous one. To be a surf photographer, you have to fend off near-drownings amidst cliff-battering waves in frigid waters. The film uses these risky aspects of surf photography as a metaphor for the trade-offs that a life of creativity requires.
Director: Mickey Smith
Producers: Helen Hayden, Revie Verran
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Computing and artificial intelligence
Why large language models are mysterious – even to their creators
8 minutes
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Sports and games
Havana’s streets become racetracks in this exhilarating portrait of children at play
5 minutes
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Spirituality
Through rituals of prayer, a monk cultivates a quietly radical concept of freedom
4 minutes
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Evolution
The many ways a lizard tongue sticks, grasps, pinches and plops – in slo-mo
6 minutes
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Design and fashion
A ceramicist puts her own bawdy spin on the folk language of pottery
14 minutes
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Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
15 minutes
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Language and linguistics
Why Susan listens to recordings of herself speaking a language she no longer remembers
5 minutes
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Biology
Starlings swoosh like brushstrokes across the sky in this dazzling short
3 minutes
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Engineering
From simple motors to levitating trains – how design shapes innovation
23 minutes