Space Tourists
DIRECTOR: Christian Frei
Switzerland, 2009, 98 min., color
Russian/Romanian/English with English subtitles

Anousheh Ansari has dreamt of going into outer space since she was a child. A number of years and $20 million later, with the help of the Russian space program, her dream is realized—Ansari becomes the first female space tourist. In recent years, a number of private citizens like Ansari have been willing to endure rigorous training in Star City, Kazakhstan, and part with significant funds to spend time aboard the International Space Station.

Director Christian Frei (The Giant Buddhas, Sundance Film Festival 2006) explores the impact of space tourism in the heavens and on Earth by adeptly weaving together multiple strands: Ansari’s joyous experience in orbit; the efforts of local villagers to claim black market rocket debris; the observations of photographer Jonas Bendiksen; and the training of the next space tourist in line. Space Tourists examines the intersections of human enterprise and commerce in the final frontier.

Category: World Cinema Directing Award - Documentary
Winner: Space Tourists

You get to see the suiting up (" I am like 1 meter from her and the only cameraman in the room, and it's a very intimate situation", says the director in this interesting interview). You also have a long, revealing close-up of Ansari in the lawn chair back on Earth. It was the first time I could see the opening of the Soyuz hatch back on the ground.

The film also follows scrap metal scavenging crews picking up the four first-stage strap-ons and the second-stage booster. It's funny seeing them look for the falling hardware, unable to locate them before they hear sonic booms!

Frei did not get the offical permission to shoot these crews, so he found their tracks from previous launches on Google Earth and tracked them!

The parallel between the scrap metal hunters' lifestyle, camping out under the stars near their huge, beaten trucks in barren Kazakhstan the night before launch, and the spaceflight participants', is treated in a unifying rather than contrasting manner. "Everyone's quests is equal under the stars", kind of...

A poem underlines this all, a beautiful piece, which applies equally well to a space voyager as well as to a stargazer lying under the stars:

Here I am, at the center of the world.
Behind me, myriads of protozoa,
before me, myriads of stars.
I lie between them in my entirety.
Two shores taming the sea,
a bridge that joins two worlds.
And, dear God, a little butterfly,
a shred of golden silk,
laughs at me like a child.

Also of interest for collectors, you see the TMA-9 crew of Ansari, Michael E. Lopez-Alegria and commander Mikhail Tyurin prepare their flight preference kits (whatever they call it at Roscosmos), and you also see Ansari cancel dozen of pieces of mail in flight.

On a side subject, you also get to see the effort of an Romanian X-Prize and Lunar Google X-Prize participant Dumitru Popescu, launching a test item with its solar hot-air balloon first stage.

Frei was first compelled to make the film after reading a news article about a wealthy Japanese businessman named Daisuke Enomoto who was paying to travel to the International Space Station.

"I knew within two hours that it was going to be my next film," Frei said.

Due to a health concern, Enomoto was disqualified from spaceflight late in his training, and Ansari, who was earmarked as a backup crewmember at the time, suddenly found herself in the vacant seat of the Russian-built Soyuz capsule.

"Interestingly enough, I had no idea Christian was making the film," Ansari told SPACE.com. "It was only three weeks before the flight when the switch happened, and I went into quarantine and never had the chance to meet him."

Frei was forced to switch gears, but luckily decided to keep filming.

"In a way, Anousheh came into my film as if from outer space," Frei said. "That's the nice thing about documentary film — you have to be open to these changes and you have to be open to new people."