Road to the Stars

The documentary comes in three parts. The first dramatises the life of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, taken as the founder of Soviet astronautics. The second describes the development of rocket technology. The third shows the future: the first manned flight, a spacewalk, the building of a space station, a landing on the Moon. All of it in 1957, before any of it happened. Pavel Klushantsev's Soviet film used effects that were extraordinary for their time: a revolving set, actors suspended on wires, shooting from below. The result makes weightlessness convincing. The film was later compared with Kubrick's 2001 and credited with anticipating some of its solutions. The telling sits between the educational film and science fiction.