The renowned mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot was once asked what had led to his great success. Mandelbrot responded: “When I seek, I look, look, look, and play with pictures. One look at a picture is like one reading on a scientific instrument. One is never enough.” (Mandelbrot, The Fractalist, 2014)
Thus, for Mandelbrot exact observations and playful experimentation are essential, as the combination of these two can lead - literally - to new ways of seeing the world. Mandelbrot's "Fractal Geometry" is an example par excellence of how “moving” images (videos) can effectively reveal self-similarity of geometric patterns like no other medium.

What do science, education and video have to do with each other? Ever since the very beginning of film in the early 20thcentury, science, film and education have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Each contributed in its own way to the production of knowledge and to progress in the endeavors of the other.

Sometimes, pictures can change everything.

We had just returned from our field productions in Guatemala and Nigeria with some of our local and Swiss research colleagues, where we tried to capture their research into social conflict on camera. Once the film stills from our co-production process of “Inequality and Conflict – Beyond us and Them” were printed on paper and lying on a table in the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Headquarters in Bern, Switzerland, the discussions of our researchers started to shift fundamentally. The previous in-depth hour-long discussions about the distinction of certain terminologies seemed less critical for the research documentary. Our core team from the Graduate Institute Geneva, ETH Zurich and University of Lausanne described the filmstills, almost with a notion of disbelieve, as “powerful” and “strong”