First on the Moon

A film crew goes after a burning object that fell in the mountains of northern Chile in 1938. The investigation leads somewhere unexpected: the Soviet Union ran a secret space programme in the thirties and launched a craft twenty-three years before Gagarin. Documents, witnesses and archive footage come out one after another. Aleksey Fedorchenko's first film is an invented documentary from beginning to end. The footage is prepared to look like period material, the witnesses speak as though they were real, and the film never once says it is joking. What it describes is also serious: secrecy, surveillance, and how a state spends its people. It won the award for best documentary at Venice in 2005, and a work of fiction taking that prize turned out to be the best joke of all.