Alexey or Aleksei? Oddly, the three Russian directors of our retrospective focus on Russia have very similar names and there is also a constant in the content of their films: space.
The first two films will be shown today at 3.15pm in Room 6, beginning with Dreaming of Space by Alexey Uchitel in which in a small harbour town in the USSR, Konyok the cook, and the waitress Lara enthusiastically follow the movements of Soviet satellites in the sky. Suddenly a mysterious foreigner convinces them that getting out of their country is not easily done.
The second film will be First On The Moon by Alexey Fedorchenko, the first mockumentary (fictional documentary) filmed in Russia. In the spring of 1938 in the northern Chilean mountains, a burning UFO falls to Earth. A television crew investigates this occurence and in doing so, discovers that the Soviet Union was conducting secret space missions in the 30s, 23 years before Gagarin’s launch.
At 6.30pm hurry to Room 4 to see Paper Soldier by Aleksei German Jr. In 1960s Moscow, Daniel Pokrovsky, a medical official for complicated relations, is the medical consultant for astronauts. But such strong friendships are squeezed to the point of psychological collapse when one of them dies…
