Space Tourists
| Space Tourists | |
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Space Tourists movie poster
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| Directed by | Christian Frei |
| Produced by | Christian Frei |
| Starring |
Anousheh Ansari Jonas Bendiksen Dumitru Popescu Charles Simonyi |
| Music by |
Edward Artemyev Jan Garbarek Steve Reich |
| Cinematography | Peter Indergand |
| Edited by | Christian Frei |
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Release date
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Running time
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98 minutes |
| Country | Switzerland |
| Language | Russian, English, Rouanian |
Space Tourists is a feature-length documentary of the Swiss director Christian Frei. The film had its premiere at the Zurich Film Festival in 2009 and has won the "World Cinema Directing Award" at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010.
The documentary juxtaposes the journeys of extremely rich tourists traveling with the astronauts into space with the poor Kazakh metal collectors risking their lives in search for rocket waste fallen down into the plains once the space shuttle has left. Critics acclaimed this film for its breathtaking imagery and richness of insights.
The film accompanies the first female space traveler who was not a space agency employee, Anousheh Ansari, who paid US $20 million for her flight into space.
On the other side the film shows the poor Kazakh metal collectors risking their lives in search for rocket waste that fall literally from heaven. In the film we hear as well Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen who has followed these metal collectors long time ago. The film has its sad and funny sides. We observe for example Charles Simonyi, chief developer of Word and Excel at his space training and at his tasting of space food. Another protagonist of the film is Dumitru Popescu, an aerospace enthusiast who applied at the Google Lunar X-Prize of the X-Prize Foundation, founded by Anousheh Ansari.
Christopher Campbell wrote on the official bloc of DOC: The Documentary Channel:
Frei’s methods of telling these interconnected stories tied to modern spaceflight is fittingly of a revolving nature, and in the end we’re back to a beginning of sorts with a look at the training ground for the next tourists, in Star City, Russia. There aren’t too many straight interviews in the film nor is there a lot of direct exposition, although Ansari, Bendiksen and Popescu contribute some voiceover narration to their sections. It’s a bumpy and winding trip but worth it every moment. And while you aren’t going to know exactly what it’s like to go to outer space in the end, you’ll have taken a virtual tour through as much of the inner and outer workings of what’s involved in modern space travel as you can possibly get from an entertaining, enlightening documentary film.
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Wikipedia