Russia has released a trailer for “The Challenge,” the first feature film to be shot in space.
It was shot some 400 kilometers above Earth on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2021 — before the invasion of Ukraine — and will be released next month, making it the first movie in which the actors and director were flown out to space for filming.
In 2020, Hollywood star Tom Cruise, along with director Doug Liman, had revealed plans to travel to the ISS to shoot a feature film in collaboration with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and NASA. There’s no sign yet of that movie.
“The Challenge” is about a female cardiac surgeon called Zhenya (played by Russian actress Yulia Peresild) who is part of a team of doctors sent to operate on a cosmonaut (played by actual cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy) who loses consciousness while on the ISS.
Peresild and producer-director Klim Shipenko traveled to the ISS along with cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov in October 2021 and filmed the movie over the course of 12 days.
In July 2022, Yuri Borisov, the newly appointed head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, said during a meeting with President Vladimir Putin that Russia would fulfill its obligations to its partners on the ISS before leaving the project in 2024.
“The decision to leave the station after 2024 has been made,” Borisov said, to which Putin responded: “Good.”
