Moscow-Cassiopeia

A signal reaches Earth from the constellation Cassiopeia: somebody out there is in trouble. Vitya Sereda, a young inventor, proposes the design of a ship that could get there. There is one problem: the flight takes twenty-seven years. So the crew is made up of schoolchildren, who will be adults by the time they arrive. The children are selected, trained and launched. Then a passenger who should not be aboard turns up and the arithmetic falls apart. Richard Viktorov directs the Soviet science fiction; eighty-five minutes, from a script by Isay Kuznetsov and Avenir Zak. The story does not end here; a second film made the following year tells what the children find on the planet they reach.