Apollo 11

A documentary that tells the first landing on the Moon entirely through footage from the time. There is no narrator, no expert commentary, nothing shot afterwards. On screen there is only image and sound recorded in 1969: the preparation before launch, the talk in mission control, the crowds waiting on the beach, and the flight itself. The starting point was an archival discovery. Reels of very large format film, unexamined for years, were found in NASA storage and contained never-used footage of extraordinary clarity. The team also digitised thousands of hours of audio and separated the talk by speaker. The method is not to inform but to make the process happen in real time. Countdown, separation, landing and return come in order, and the viewer feels seated in those rooms. Among the most striking passages are the close shots of the Saturn rocket before launch; the images are so clean they look as though they were taken today. Todd Douglas Miller directed. Among the best examples of its genre for anyone who likes documentary and the history of spaceflight. For a viewer expecting explanation, the film explains nothing and leaves the technical language as it is.