gagarin: A Yuri-ka! Gagarin moment for movies

The Ruskies have beaten the Yanks again, in space. This time, theirs is the first feature film to be shot outside Earth. Released last week, Klim Shipenko‘s Vyzov – which, in English, translates to both ‘Call’ and ‘Challenge’ – is about a doctor making a ‘house call’ to attend to a patient, on the International Space Station (ISS). Actor Yulia Peresild plays a thoracic surgeon who goes ‘up’ to save a cosmonaut’s life – played by real-life cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky. What makes the film unique is that some 30 hours of footage was shot on board ISS, with 50 minutes of it used in the final film. Unlike Universal Pictures announcing in 2022 that it would be making a film in space in collaboration with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and with Tom Cruise as the lead-astronaut, Shipenko’s movie really escaped gravity. One small step for Russian space science, one giant leap for Russian cinema.

But apart from the Yuri-ka! moment Gagarin would have relished, for the first time, a movie set in space has forgone sets and special effects for its ‘space scenes’ and gone for verite – truth – as its USP. Could this kind of authenticity be the riposte to all types of verisimilitude AI is throwing up every day? Remember, a film with Deepika in space is far more exciting than Deepika pretending to be in space. Even if audiences can’t tell the difference until told.