The Pellegrini Lab - Short film

Student - Francis Kurniawan

Supervisor - Laura Pellegrini

This project sits somewhere between being a student in the lab and looking at it from the outside. I was placed in a group working on choroid plexus organoids and CSF, and very quickly realised that their work is both technically impressive and almost completely invisible compared to flashier stories about “mini‑brains” or AI in biomedicine. That imbalance bothered me, so instead of writing about the lab from a distance, I decided to make a short documentary‑style film and treat it as a way of opening up what they do to people who would otherwise never hear about it. 

The documentary follows the lab’s work on human choroid plexus organoids as models of the blood–CSF barrier, but it also pays attention to the people, the meetings, and even the potluck that holds that work together day to day. In social‑science terms, I’m interested in questions of visibility and translation: who gets seen, which bits of biology feel “important” enough to communicate, and how a student like me ends up deciding which stories to tell on everyone’s behalf. The abstract is therefore less about presenting neutral outreach and more about reflecting on what it means to act as a partial insider trying to make a very quiet piece of brain science a little louder

See the full movie at - (password Scicomm)  Francis.mov