Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
The Voyager spacecrafts were launched by the United States in 1977 to explore our Solar System’s gas giants – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – and then interstellar space, where they’re still gathering valuable information. In addition to their mission of exploration, they’re also on a mission of communication: each craft is equipped with a ‘golden record’ featuring sounds and images of life on Earth, and information about our place in the cosmos, intended as a message to any extraterrestrial beings that might find them. Combining animation, archival photographs, videos, images, sounds and a sweeping, operatic score, Santiago Menghini’s short film Voyagers is a stunning tribute to one of humanity’s most ambitious – and idealistic – projects.
Director: Santiago Menghini
Website: Nemesis Films
video
Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
video
Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
9 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
video
Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
7 minutes
video
Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
video
Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes