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Loving a pet is usually accompanied by a sombre and unavoidable truth: unless you’ve bought a puppy to accompany you through your final days or are providing excellent care to your tortoise, your dear animal companion will likely precede you in death. However, if you’re a dog owner who happens to have $100,000 to spare, the wonders of modern medical technology do offer a potential loophole. Co-starring the Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari, her beloved 16-year-old Shih Tzu Norman and the US singer and dog-cloning proponent Barbra Streisand, Norman, Norman follows Romvari as she falls into a YouTube hole on the promises, perils and prohibitive cost of pet cloning. Bittersweet and inflected with understated humour, this offbeat short debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2018.
Director: Sophy Romvari
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Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
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Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
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War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
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Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
16 minutes
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
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Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
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Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes