The Russian space agency had suddenly revealed its film project in 2020, after the announcement of a filming project on board the ISS with Tom Cruise, the star of the Saga “Mission impossible”.
Le Monde with AFP
If the images have always accompanied the missions in the space – of the first steps on the moon, in 1969, to publications on the social networks of the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet -, never a feature film N ‘ had been done on the other side of the Karman line. An actress and a Russian director took off, Tuesday, October 5, in the morning, to turn the first feature film in the orbit of history, and thus score symbolic points against American competitors, after years of disappointment. The challenge is to outpace the film project in space with Tom Cruise, whose calendar is not known.
Accompanied by a seasoned cosmonaut, the actress Iulia Peressild, 37, and the director Klim Chipenko, 38, flew away for the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Soyuz rocket, from the site Russian Baikonour, Kazakhstan. The team will be twelve days to turn the spatial sequences of a movie temporarily entitled The Challenge, a work, whose budget is kept secret, which will stage a doctor whose mission is to save a cosmonaut.
At a press conference, Monday, the director and the actress appeared relaxed. This first feature film in space will have value of “experience,” said Mr. Chipenko, who will handle the camera and will take care of makeup and lighting in the unique space of the Russian segment of the ‘ISS. “I do not have anyone who asks for advice. I have no cader who ask how to filming in the light of the porthole,” he said.
Score a point against the rival American
Beyond this first artistic, this trip must allow Moscow to score a point against the American rival, in a context of increasing tensions. For the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos, the film must restore a tarnished blazon by the corruption scandals, series failures and the loss of the lucrative monopoly of the flights inhabited to the ISS, since the entrance to Space X , from ELON MUSK. For Roscosmos, it is therefore a question of “triumphing NASA and Space X” and “divert attention [vis-à-vis its] problems,” said Konstantin Kalatchev Politologist.
The Russian agency had suddenly revealed its film project in 2020, after the announcement of a filming project aboard the ISS with Tom Cruise, the star of the mission mission impossible. The two figo-travelers of space, two figures of the Russian cinema, have followed an accelerated training to learn to withstand the violent acceleration of takeoff or to move by weightlessness.
Russia therefore intends to mingle with the spatial tourism race, which has experienced acceleration in recent months with the flights of the US billionaires and British Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. It must thus propel in December a Japanese billionaire into space.
Among the other ambitions of Roscosmos are a strictly Russian spatial station and a Russo-Chinese station in orbit, or even on the moon, Moscow having decided to snap the door of a Lunar Washington project deemed too US-centered. But none of these projects still have a specific budget or schedule.
