The Challenge

A cosmonaut on the space station is injured and his condition does not allow a return to Earth; the operation has to be done up there. A heart surgeon in Moscow, Yevgenia, is selected. Training that normally takes years is compressed into a few months. She is sent up and has to operate in zero gravity. Klim Shipenko directs. Yulia Peresild plays Yevgenia. What the film is known for is where it was shot. It was made on the International Space Station; Peresild and Shipenko travelled there with the cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov in October 2021 and filmed for twelve days. It is the first feature length film with actors shot in space. Peresild got the part through an open call. Roscosmos advertised in 2020, and candidates had to pass medical, psychological and physical tests as well as submit an audition. It was a joint production of Roscosmos and the state channel Channel One with a budget over a billion roubles. The narrative itself falls behind the technical achievement. The melodrama is conventional, the characters are thin, and the scenes on the ground are at television scale; the value of the film lies largely in the real footage. The operation was shot in zero gravity and offers images with no equivalent in the genre. Who it is for: anyone interested in space films and in how they were made. Who it is not for: the script is weak, the emotional pitch is high, and the film can also be read as a promotional exercise.