A Soviet filmmaker dreams of Venus while Earth crumbles around him — art or delusion?
August 1960. Director Nikolai Berentsev is working on a large-scale science fiction film about an expedition to Venus. The construction of grandiose decorations begins in the pavilion. Berentsev himself develops models of planets and spacecraft, comes up with special devices for combined filming. He tries to imagine and visualize something that no one has ever seen — life on other planets. He believes that fantasy should run ahead of science, but faces skepticism from colleagues and the scientific community. In the end, he himself begins to doubt whether his film is needed by the audience, why these dreams of Space, when there are so many unresolved problems on Earth.
Production
Hand-crafted spacecraft models that cost more than the director's sanity.
Acting
Gilev's trembling hands holding paper planets like sacred relics.
Director
Mikhail Arkhipov
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The 1960 Soviet space program was racing America while filmmakers imagined impossible futures — this tension between real rocketry and celluloid dreams defined the era's cultural schizophrenia.
Berentsev's fictional film-within-film mirrors the lost 1962 Soviet epic 'The Sky Calls' — director Mikhail Karyukov's similarly doomed Venus project that collapsed under budget cuts and ideological scrutiny.
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