Andrei Ujică / Germany, Russia, France, Belgium / 96’ / 1995

In August 1991, tanks advance toward the White House in Moscow, seat of government of the Russian Soviet Republic. Although the coup fails, the Soviet Union rapidly dissolves in the following months. Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev is not present when it happens: he had left for the Mir space station in May when he returned 10 months later, landing in Russia.
For his film about the last Soviet cosmonaut, Andrei Ujică drew on footage shot during the mission, to which he added fictional commentary. He also sent a 35 mm camera to the Russian space station. He asked cinematographer Vadim Yusov-in homage to his camera work in Tarkovski’s film Solaris to prepare the filming process and coordinate it from mission control on Earth, thus creating the first purely cinematic images shot in space. These long shots of Mir’s space orbit contrast with the short, chaotic shots of rapid changes on Earth, providing the backdrop for Krikalev’s sobering comment, “For a cosmonaut, the speed with which day and night and seasons fly by is most impressive.”

Written by Andrei Ujică
Cinematography by Vadim Jusov.
Music by Ralf Henninger, Heidi Leihbecher, Svetlana Ivanova
Interviews with Sergei Krikalëv, Anatolij Arcebarskij, Aleksandr Volkov
Produced by Elke Peters
for Bremer Institut Film/Fernsehen, WDR, La Sept/Arte, RTBF, St. Petersburg Documentary Film Studio, Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, Loy Arnold Filmproduktion.

Andrei Ujică
Andrei Ujică was born on November 13, 1951, in Timișoara, Romania. With a background in literature, Ujică decided in 1990 to devote himself to filmmaking and made his debut with Videograms of a Revolution (1992), co-directed with Harun Farocki, which became a landmark film about the relationship between political power and the media in Europe at the end of the Cold War. His second film, Out of the Present (1995), tells the story of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who spent ten months aboard the Mir space station while on Earth the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Out of the Present has been compared to such iconic titles in film history as 2001: A Space Odyssey o Solaris, and is famous for being one of the most recognized documentary films of the 1990s. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010), widely considered a monumental achievement, concludes his trilogy dedicated to the end of communism. Andrei Ujică also made two commissioned works for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain: 2 Pasolini (short film, 2000/2021) and Unknown Quantity, with Paul Virilio and Svetlana Alexievitch.