Filmmakers Mirjam Veske and Nils Eilif Bremdal have unveiled a short movie which depicts the life or death struggles of an unknown, lost cosmonaut, thought by some to have burned to death upon re-entry at the height of the Cold War.
Kosmonauta depicts a disputed event which, if true, could potentially re-write the history of Russia’s cosmonauts, Moviepilot notes. The film is inspired by a recording, made in 1963, by Italian brothers Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia. The pair established an experimental listening station at Torre Bert, from which they claimed to listen in on Russian cosmonauts during the early days of their space program. They released nine recordings, which they asserted were the records of failed missions that took the lives of cosmonauts, who either suffocated, died upon re-entry, or were lost in deep space.
While details of the recordings have called into question their authenticity, NPR points out that Russia did indeed lose a cosmonaut in a failed Soyuz mission. As detailed in the book Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin , by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was lost in 1967 when the parachutes of his Soyuz capsule failed.
Moon over #Ukraine from the #OrbitalPerspective of astronauts & cosmonauts in space pic.twitter.com/GBwzich073
— Fragile Oasis (@FragileOasis) September 29, 2014
Kosmonauta is based upon one of the recordings, made in November of 1963. A female cosmonaut could be heard, purportedly communicating with mission control. The unnamed cosmonaut described being hot, but breathing oxygen. At one point, she claimed to see a flame, before the signal is lost.
#UPDATE Crew including first woman cosmonaut in 17 years blasts off for ISS http://t.co/0weRKVIZKT pic.twitter.com/030FLA7rnZ — Agence France-Presse (@AFP) September 25, 2014
Last month, Elena Serova became the first female cosmonaut to crew the International Space Station, and the first to go into space in 17 years, as The Inquisitr previously reported. The flight was marred by malfunction, as one of the Soyuz capsule’s solar panels failed to deploy, though the crew of two cosmonauts and one astronaut was able to successfully dock with the space station.
Today I walked along trees planted by cosmonauts since Gagarin. Feels like a fairy-tale. Good night from Baikonour! pic.twitter.com/XMxgDBFm6Z
— Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) May 15, 2014
Veska and Bremdal’s film is the result of the pair working together on a final project before graduating film school in Norway. Working in tandem as Production Designer and Cinematographer, the pair co-directed Kosmonauta , turning an uncertain piece of audio into an account of a cosmonaut whose name may be lost to history.
[Image via Moviepilot ]
