A Language Of Shapes
A film by Samantha Moore, based on the research of the Mostowy Lab.
Emi, a young girl with a stomach upset, enters the magical, microscopic world inside a zebrafish and aids the defenders of her cells to outwit the invading Shigella bacteria. At a time when there is increased anxiety around the viral attack on our cells by Coronavirus, this enchanting fairytale film decodes and celebrates the research happening in The Mostowy Lab at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. In an accessible and engaging way it aims to convey cutting edge research about how our cells defeat invading pathogens, and how these scientific discoveries can improve wellbeing and save lives around the world.
A film by Samantha Moore, based on the research of the Mostowy Lab. Produced by Animate Projects and supported by a Wellcome Trust Research Enrichment Grant and by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Screenings include: Einstein’s Garden at Green Man Festival 2022, Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival, Athens Animfest, Cosmo Genetics Festival, Fest Ança, and Bloomsbury Festival in October 2022.
The film screened online on 17 September on Labocine.com for #InternationalMicroorganismDay
Read more about the outcomes of the project in the evaluation report written by Debbie Allan, MSc – A Very Human Story.
In the development of the project we worked with Central Saint Martins, Manchester Metropolitan University, and Volda University College. The resulting Storytelling Science workshops were designed for young people (aged 13-17) with an interest in art and/or science. The workshops combined art, science, and storytelling to better understand bacterial infection and were designed to merge digital and hands-on creative activities in a safe online space.
For more information visit Storytelling Science.
Samantha Moore is an award-winning animated documentary maker. She loves the joyfulness and eclectic nature of animation. No one ever finds animation intimidating, and yet it can convey complex or challenging ideas to a wide audience in an engaging way. Sam has made work on diverse subjects, from competitive sweet-pea growing, to cutting edge microbiology, and her own experience of having twins. Her film Bloomers (2019) was about a knicker factory in Manchester and has won several awards including ‘Best British Film’ at London International Animation Festival and was nominated for a British Animation Award.
Serge Mostowy, PhD (Chief Scientific Collaborator) is a Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, Wellcome Beit, and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow. He studied Physics, Evolution, and Microbiology & Immunology at McGill University in Canada. After postdoctoral work on the Cell Biology of Infection at Institut Pasteur in France, he moved to Imperial College London in 2012 to start a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship. In 2018, Serge was appointed Professor of Cellular Microbiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where he and his team investigate novel roles for the cytoskeleton in innate immunity. They also developed the zebrafish as an important model to study the cell biology of infection and therapeutic potential of targeting the cytoskeleton in vivo, both at the single cell and whole animal level.
