Houston, We Have a Problem!

The film says that Yugoslavia ran a secret space programme in the early nineteen-sixties and that the United States bought it for billions of dollars. Witnesses talk, archive footage rolls, documents are produced, and the account ties all of it to familiar events of the Cold War. What the viewer is expected to work out somewhere along the way is this: the story it tells is invented. This is not a documentary but a fiction using the documentary form. Žiga Virc's real subject is not space but how a story becomes credible: put real archive, real faces and the right tone of voice together and a fabricated history turns persuasive. Slavoj Žižek is the voice in the film that talks about exactly this. When it was released a great many viewers took the account as fact, and that reaction proved the film's own argument. The footage of Tito, Kennedy and Nixon is archival.