Roskosmos, a short film by fourth-year Media Studies major and student-filmmaker Rom Alejandro, is frightening and intelligent. It's successful in its nostalgic lauding of Russian film and effective in its disturbing look at what lies beyond -- who we become when we no longer have control, when "nothing is coming" and no hope remains.
In May 1968, the Russian space program Roskosmos launched Soyuz-0, a spacecraft that eventually went haywire and then AWOL on a hauntingly ambiguous mission to space. The earth-stationed Roskosmos denied its existence.
Roskosmos tells the harrowing story of this spacecraft as it made its ascent into the infinite abyss of space. While the story is indeed vaguely based in mangled truths, Alejandro said it was "more about establishing a mythology ... if I could make it interesting enough, people would go for it."
"No one really knows anything about the Russian space program," Alejandro said, and this successfully added to the vague atmosphere of uncertainty, doubt and incoherency.
The film experiments with notions of abandonment, hopelessness and the extension of power, as Kuleshov (Zack Bonnie), the male lead in the film, takes drastic measures to elevate his position, which leads to the revelatory discovery that he has to look to himself in order to achieve fulfillment --- aggressive measures toward others cannot, and will not, solve his inner neuroses. By the end of the film, Kuleshov exclaims, "Touch the sun. Hold the earth in your hand."
According to Alejandro, Kuleshov has an "out of body experience" through his actions. The startling ambiguity of the film's story evokes images of David Bowie's Major Tom while the disquieting silence is reminiscent of The Shining.
The film, eerie and alternative in its fabrication, was created in homage to traditional Russian film editing.
"[It's] primarily a study on Russian film making," Alejandro said, taking cues from filmmakers Lev Kuleshov, Sergeii Eisenstein, as well as Stanley Kubrick. Alejandro, who dedicated the film to the victim of a stabbing, said he "first started off just thinking about existentialism," which evolved into a question of "what does the end mean ... and how scary that is, but how comforting that is as well."
Alejandro said that gender and race dynamics of science fiction films influenced his decision to cast a Korean actress (Catherine Kim) with Zack Bonnie in an effective and powerful juxtaposition.
Pre-filming, Alejandro worked with his actors for two hours per week for four weeks, as they "tried to focus on acting through visual cues." Alejandro says he tries to "set up a space where they feel they can trust me as a director, and the environment they're in parallels that of the movie." Alejandro sees acting and shooting the film as critical aspects of moviemaking and those which he involves himself most significantly in. "My filmmaking is always trying to find the film by shooting it," he said.
Rom Alejandro's Roskosmos, a "gigantic beast of a production," is a powerful and disconcerting film -- it is a commanding look at the notions of hopelessness and abandonment and proposes the question of what remains when nothing is left.
Roskosmos premieres Oct. 15 at 3 p.m. at Newcomb Theater.
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