Rogue AI, fungal pandemics, nuclear apocalypse, alien invasions, environmental collapse, planetary extinction… Science fiction, it often seems, can imagine almost anything but a hopeful future. From Terminator and The Matrix to Black Mirror, from Fallout to The Last of Us and Silo, its visions are dystopian: the human race enslaved, barely surviving, wiped out.

But Canberra filmmaker Masoud Varjavandi wants to imagine humanity creating a better future.

His Space Faring Civilisation Film Festival – a celebration of human curiosity, ingenuity and progress – returns to Dendy Cinemas on Sunday 23 August as part of National Science Week.

“We use compassion and science to make a better future,” Mr Varjavandi said. “It’s going to be an optimistic future because we make it so.”

It presents independent science fiction films, documentaries and animations from around the world – the USA, Italy, Mexico, China, Croatia and Australia – with one uniting theme: communicating how science fits within society and brings people together.

A female engineer works on a helmet to explore moon caves. A young man lands on an unknown planet and recognises fragments of ancient stories. A young woman loses touch with reality through digital media. An Earth astronaut leaves a photo on the moon half a century ago.

On a frozen planet where workers are limited to 113 words a day to conserve energy, one man saves his daily words for a phone call with his wife. Isolated lovers reunite in a world engulfed by garbage. A raccoon dreams of flying with a jetpack in outer space. A microbiologist explores an alien environment.

The documentaries concern the Wright brothers’ historic flight and NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars; Kyrgyzstan’s Bishkek planetarium; and the Neanderthals.

The day also features a film-making workshop; Isabel Richards, co-founder of the Sci_Burst podcast, as keynote speaker; and a live expert Q&A panel with filmmaker Emily Bennett and actress Amelia Hurst.

Mr Varjavandi believes too much contemporary science fiction “feeds on our fears rather than our hopes”.

“I feel that we’re going too much towards fear and dystopian drama, and we need to find the balance again.

“It’s classic childhood psychology. If you keep telling your child you’re bad, they’re going to grow up thinking they’re bad. Same with society. You keep telling society you’re bad, there’s going to be a dystopian future, things are going to be destroyed – what’s going to happen? Society is going to grow up and say, well, if things are going to be bad, I might be bad as well. We need hope – we always need hope.”

One science fiction show – Star Trek: The Next Generation – gave Mr Varjavandi hope and comfort as a child growing up in a persecuted Baha’i family in Iran. It showed people from different backgrounds – bald Englishmen playing French captains, Americans, people of colour, androids, Klingons – working together to create something better.

Creator Gene Roddenberry’s ethos aligned with his own Baha’i beliefs in the unity of mankind, working together to bring the whole world together in peace and progress, equality between men and women, and harmony of science and religion.

“One of the premises is that it’s going to be an optimistic future because we make it so – we take control; we use compassion and science to make a better future.”

A decade ago, Mr Varjavandi left a career in IT to make films – intelligent, inspiring science fiction in the tradition of Star Trek.

“Not only are not many people making it; there’s no market for it,” he said. “There’s a gap. Even the big budget stories have gone towards the more action kind of sci fi.”

Hence the film festival.

“Whenever I talk about optimistic sci-fi, I always get the response that it’s too utopian, it’s not realistic. I always think to myself: why is that not realistic? Why can’t we achieve the world that Star Trek portrayed?”

Mr Varjavandi hopes audiences leave believing that science can create a better future – and even tell hopeful stories of their own.

“If they make positive films themselves, that’s my job done,” he said.

Or as Gene Roddenberry said: “There is a tomorrow—it’s not all going to be over with a big flash and a bomb; the human race is improving…”

The 2026 SFC Film Festival is at Dendy Cinemas Canberra on Sunday 23 August, from 10am to 6pm. Tickets and the full program are available through Humanitix.