A blockbuster Russian drama about the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, has hit the big screen. The $7 million film is more factual than fictional, based on recently released secret archive material on the legendary Soviet cosmonaut.
The film first premiered in Moscow on April 12 and was
screened at the UN’s Vienna International Center, and is now
hitting Russian wide screens.
According to the film’s crew, ‘Gagarin: The First in
Space’ tells the story of the race to be the first to put a
human in space – the Cold War confrontation between the two
superpowers, the USSR and US. Film producer and co-writer Oleg
Kapanets, who has worked in Hollywood since 1992, said that the
complicated project took six years of hard work.
“A lot of books have been written about Yuri Gagarin, so we
took our time rereading numerous documentary accounts and
autobiographical materials about him,” he said at a Moscow
press conference for the film. “We wanted to pick up some
extraordinary moments of his life and piece them together. The
challenge was to translate the material into the language of film
to appeal to audiences. In the long run we chose the main theme
of the film to be the flight itself and the man behind
it.”
Kapanets also explained how troves of material from secret
Russian archives were revealed for the 50th anniversary of the
first manned spaceflight: “This is how we’ve discovered
several sketches of the rockets and of the capsule that we later
recreated in our film in accordance with the released
data.”
In 1960 fighter pilot Gagarin was shortlisted for the
Vostok 1 program built on the success of Sputnik 1. Yuri's
closest rival for selection was German Titov. The promising
cosmonauts did their best to impress their space program director
Sergey Korolev.
The film producer said they had also worked with a number of
space experts and turned for advice to the legendary cosmonauts
from the first cosmonaut team, such as Aleksey Leonov and Boris
Volynovm during the shooting. “We tested facts from books and
witness accounts on them,” Kapanets explained.
Vadim Michman – the actor playing the second man in space, Titov
– said he could not imagine what the Russian cosmonauts felt when
they first went into space: “What they did to fly into space,
and how they did it... Not everyone can even come to think of
it.”
After his historic flight, Gagarin became a worldwide celebrity
and was never far from the spotlight. He visited several
countries and was pictured with film celebrities and stars like
Gina Lollobrigida, or political leaders like Fidel Castro and Che
Gevara, but never forgot about his childhood friends and family.
Those who knew him personally said that even after he had
“skyrocketed” into fame, stardom meant nothing to the
first man to orbit the earth.
Gagarin tragically died in a military training flight on March
27, 1968, at 34 years of age. “A separate movie about
Gagarin’s death could be made. There’s yet a lot to
discover,” Kapanets said.
Kapanets added that the release of ‘Gagarin: The First in
Space’ is well-timed to help close a widening generation gap:
“If children fail to know who Gagarin is, we’ll lose ourselves
as a nation.”
On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin blasted
off in a Vostok rocket, becoming the first human in space and
orbiting Earth for 108 minutes. Over 50 years after the legendary
voyage, Gagarin’s courage continues to serve as a role model and
source of inspiration for space explorers across the world. In
2011, the UN deemed April 12 the International Day of Human Space
Flight.
For decades, Russia’s space program has been primarily
oriented towards manned space flights, which comprise 58 percent
of the space budget. Russia must “keep the leader’s experience
of the manned flights and catch up in other space exploration
programs,” President Vladimir Putin said in April of this
year.
By 2020, the Russian government plans to allocate up to $52
billion for the national space industry. And by 2030, the
turnover of the space industry globally could grow fivefold,
reaching $1.5 trillion from its current $300-400 billion.