Synopsis
May 1991. The Soviet cosmonaut Sergheï Krikalev flies to the Mir orbital station, which he will occupy for ten months under the eye of four cameras. When he returns, the Soviet Empire has disappeared, broken up, dismantled. During his time in space, one era ended, another was born. Thus, Krikalev became the first cosmonaut to carry out a mission for a country that no longer exists!
A word from Tënk
An archival film: Ujică tells us the story of Krikalev by adopting his point of view and editing only the footage from the visual documentation of his mission (except for the beginning and end of the film). We go to Space with the last Soviet cosmonaut, without any commentary and out of the present time. The raw document is transcended and leads to a theoretical reflection on cinema and history. But the most dizzying dialogue is the one that Ujică establishes with the emotional and formal arsenal of fiction cinema. For example, he provokes the meeting of two monuments of science fiction from the Cold War period. The cinematographer of Solaris, Vadim Joussov, shoots the prologue and the epilogue in Space, while the music is inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Out of the Present literally projects us into a purely mythological Otherworld and into the philosophical imagination of the 20th century. It is no longer the gods who watch, ironically, the ephemeral fate of humans from their Olympus, but it is man - the child and slave of Technology - who contemplates helplessly the collapse of the most extreme experience of prometheism. We are the last spectators.
Federico Rossin
Cinema historian, independent programmer
