A FLAGELLATE SEARCHING FOR LOVE

2024. Digital Video, 10 min. 40 sec.

Flagellate Searching for Love captures slime mold moving along symbols of love, diagrams of reproductive cells and signs of genders. Themes are searching for love, relationships, sex and reproduction.

The film explores the mechanism of falling in love, and love and sexual "chemistry". It is thought that these areas of life occur at the cellular level. What really happens when a very charming cellular formation hits? Is love a biological process based on finding suitable cells?

The randomness and unfairness associated with love life, mating and emotions are things that an individual cannot fully control, and perhaps that is why they evoke such great feelings.

Slime molds reproduce sexually from swarming cells, i.e., flagellates. They are isogamic, so they have rather complicated gender relations. A sperm and an egg are needed for the birth of a human being, but the swarming cell of the slime mold must meet the opposite swarming cell, which has just a certain combination of genes. Breeding with others is not possible. For example, Physarum polycephalum slime mold has 720 of these different gene variants, thus genders.