Baikonur, Earth. Directed by Andrea Sorini. World premiere at Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»International Film Festival: Thursday, Oct. 4 at International Village 10, 7 p.m. For schedule visit .
The cinematic gaze of Italian filmmaker Andrea Sorini turns to the remote lunar landscape surrounding Baikonur, Kazakhstan, in a new documentary receiving its world premiere at this year’s Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»International Film Festival.
Sorini, based in Rome and a fan of science fiction, originally began working on a fiction film about Laika, the stray dog the Soviets sent into outer space from Baikonur in 1957 but after doing some research decided to shoot a documentary about the area itself cinéma vérité style in the grand tradition of Jean Rouch and Dziga Vertov.
The otherworldly location is home to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, one of the few places on earth where astronauts can set off for the International Space Station (ISS), with launches taking off every three to six months. The spaceport sits on the northern bank of the Syr Darya river in southern Kazakhstan, leased and administered by the Russian Federation through 2050.
The Cosmodrome, built by the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s in the Kazakh desert on the outskirts of the ancient Silk Road route, was the world’s first full-service spaceport and launched both the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, on Oct. 4, 1957, and the first human spaceflight, Vostok 1, on April 12, 1961.Ěý Laika, the Soviet space dog went up in Sputnik 2 on Nov. 3, 1957.
The site was chosen because of its close proximity to the Equator (“one step closer to space”) and the flatness of the surrounding area suited the radio control system used at the time to communicate with rocket launches.
A city was built to support the space centre (which grew to a population of 150,000 people at its peak in the 1980s) with hundreds of kilometres of rail lines and roads built to service the launch pad facilities.
The Soviet Union gave their new spaceport complex a “fake” name in an attempt to keep the location a secret. In Kazakhstan the region was already known as Tyuratam, the site of Töre’s grave, a nomadic descendant of Genghis Khan. Baikonur was actually the name of a real city hundreds of kilometres away from the Cosmodrome. Dummy launch pads were also built to confuse things but an American U-2 spy plane took aerial photographs of the R-7 Launch Pad in Tyuratam in August, 1957, confirming the location of the spaceport.
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Today Baikonur is a commercial and military launch facility used by several nations and Sorini had few problems accessing the site with his five-man film crew in 2017.
“It took a long time but it wasn’t difficult,” says Sorini. “Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency was very approachable but it’s a long process. We shot at two different times. The first time we didn’t enter the Cosmodrome but we met some people there and on the second visit we were allowed to enter. There were lots of military checks but it was not difficult.”
The Italian film crew worked with light equipment, says Sorini. “We had a Blackmagic camera, a Sony 7S and a little drone with a tripod and Steadicam. (The group included myself), a DOP, a soundman and two producers, one of whom was also second unit photography plus one car. It was very light.”
Except for one shot into the heavens Baikonur, Earth is all original footage shot over two visits in 2017 by Sorini’s crew. The result is equal parts Kubrick, Tarkovsky and Herzog mixed in with the existential structural pacing of an Antonioni or Ackerman film.
An aerial shot, made possible with a DJI drone, opens the film. Reminiscent of the U2 spy imagery from 1957, Sorini’s footage moves slowly over the desert landscape from above before focusing on an overview image of the Soyuz MS-07 launch vehicle at Baikonur Pad 1/5, Expedition 54. Soyuz MS-07, launched Dec. 17, 2017, transported Russian commander Anton Shkaplerov and flight engineers Scott D. Tingle, NASA, and Norishige Kanai, JAXA to the ISS. Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques is scheduled to make his first space flight from Baikonur this December.
“We wanted to have mysterious sounds of exploration and unknown planets,” says Sorini. “You don’t know if the territory is big or not. I like this kind of image where you don’t really know what you are looking at.”
Both Islam and the Russian Greek Catholic Church have a presence in the region with the latter offering prayers during launch sessions. A mosque complex built in recent decades looks to be expanding its scope in a region that has traditionally been Muslim. Almost everyone speaks Russian, says Sorini, in this remote company town, but a mullah who wished them well in front of a mosque seems to only understand a Kazakh dialect.
Sound plays an important part in the film with electronic, environmental and traditional audio weaving in and out of the film.
“I worked with a musician even before the shooting began,” says Sorini. “He did some of the music based on the script. Not the usual way of working but some of his music inspired the shooting as we had some tracks while we were there. I wanted different kinds of music. At one point there is traditional Kazakh music played on the Kobyz, an instrument that Korqyt Ata, the shaman that we talk about at the end of the film, invented. It’s a very specific instrument of that area used in traditional rituals - a religious, sacred instrument. I liked the juxtaposition of the electronic and the traditional.”
The film crew came across a two-string horsehair kobyz in a museum dedicated to Korqyt Ata near Baikonur. “We recorded it in the middle of nowhere,” says Sorini. “No one could play it except for a guy that was cleaning the museum. The instrument was taken out of the glass and we recorded a long session.”
In all, the crew spent about two weeks shooting in Baikonur in 2017: nine days at the beginning of May and six more days during the launch of Soyuz MS-07.
Sorini will be in VancouverĚý for screenings of Baikonur, Earth, one of eight films receiving their world premieres at VIFF.
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