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This Short Movie About An Endless Future War Looks Unspeakably Great

Check out the trailer for The Shaman, a new short film debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival. As with a lot of short films we’ve seen lately, this has top-notch visual effects — but more than that, it looks like a thing of pure beauty. And it has an original story, with a concept I haven’t come across before.

Basically, in The Shaman, it’s 2204, and the world has been at war for 73 years. And the main character isn’t a soldier — he’s a Shaman, one of a group of people who used to be healers. But now, instead, he uses his supernatural powers to “heal” the souls of the enemy, basically helping them cross over into the afterlife. That’s what I get from the trailer, in any case. This is the work of writer/director Marco Kalantari (Ainoa).

Here’s a complete synopsis, via Indiewire’s The Playlist, which also premiered the trailer:

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Cambridge University launches £10 million AI research centre, to ‘move away from science fiction’

What will happen when machines become smarter than us?

It used to be a question purely for science fiction writers, but with experts predicting human-level AI could become a reality within this century, it’s become a pressing issue for scientists and philosophers, as they try to predict how our world will change.

Keen not to be left behind, Cambridge University has been at the forefront of the issue, and today announced the launch of a brand new centre, dedicated to answering the very real questions once seen solely as the preserve of Doctor Who or Stanley Kubrick’s HAL.

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Woman Receives Online Abuse For Saying She Doesn’t Want To Have Children

When Holly Brockwell wrote about the fact that she doesn’t want to have children, she knew her stance was controversial. But she never expected the sheer volume of backlash and abuse that would force her offline.

After 36 hours, she’s back online and set on fighting the trolls for her right — for all women’s rights — to express their opinions without fear. 👊

The 29-year-old, who is founder of the women’s tech and lifestyle site Gadgette, was commissioned by the BBC to write a piece about her — clearly divisive — stance on reproduction as part of their ‘100 Women 2015’ series.

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