First on the Moon

Something more than just a mockumentary, this film which proposes that the Soviets landed on the moon in 1938, is a deeply-felt critique of Stalinism. Using footage as supposedly diverse as newsreel celebrations of Soviet economic miracles to instructional films on how to use mini surveillance cameras, it pieces together the story of a group of cosmonauts including a model worker, a female athlete and a circus dwarf who train for an audacious mission. As their craft hurtles toward the moon and falls back to earth only for the hero to be lost amid the obsessive secrecy, suspicion and bureaucratic small-mindedness which marked the Soviet era, we see how the race for the stars was fatally compromised by the deep-seated flaws that held the Soviet system leadenly to earth. This is a film that is richly inventive in its knowledge of Soviet filmmaking and often hilarious in spite of the darkness it contemplates.

On the face of it, the movie is a merciless mockery of the former Soviet Union's obsession to be the first in everything even manipulating history. In essence, the film pays homage to Fake in the cinema, ridiculing the power of the film as a document of the times.

FIPRESCI