To shoot this film, Russia sent an actress and a director into orbit in October 2021 for 12 days. It comes out in Russia this Thursday.
The first fiction feature film shot in orbit was released in theaters in Russia on Thursday, with a particularly evocative title in the context of Moscow’s new space ambitions in the face of Washington: The challenge.
To shoot this film, which features a surgeon dispatched to the International Space Station (ISS) to operate on an injured cosmonaut, Russia sent an actress and a director into orbit in October 2021 for 12 days.
“We are the first”
The project, carried out with a bang to get ahead of a competing American initiative with Tom Cruise, has become an object of pride in Russia, recalling the space competition between Moscow and Washington during the Cold War.
“We are the first to have shot a feature film aboard a spacecraft in orbit, again the first”, welcomed Vladimir Putin on April 12, who often plays on nostalgia for the Soviet era, when Moscow, for example, sent the first man into space in 1961.
The film is co-produced by the Russian space agency Roscosmos and the television channel Pervy Kanal, whose director, Konstantin Ernst, does not hide his joy at having beaten Hollywood.
“We are all fans of Gravity“, Hollywood film about space released in 2013, said Konstantin Ernst on Monday, during a press conference presenting the Russian film. “But our Challengeshot in real weightlessness, today brings out the digital special effects” of the American film, he tackled.
A surgeon’s mission impossible
The sequences shot in the 230 m3 of the Russian module of the ISS and the participation of the three Russian professional cosmonauts stationed on board give an effect of authenticity to the film, previewed by AFP.
The challenge tells the story of the impossible mission of a surgeon, played by actress Ioulia Peressild, sent to the ISS to save a cosmonaut injured by debris during a spacewalk.
Director Klim Chipenko, 39, who handled the camera, lighting and sound recording, recorded 30 hours of footage there, 50 minutes of which are used in the final cut.
The camera follows the 38-year-old actress moving through the cramped space of the ISS, her blonde hair floating weightlessly. The two neo-cosmonauts underwent accelerated four-month training before being sent into space. The film cost “less than a billion rubles” (11.1 million euros), according to Konstantin Ernst.
