Cosmosapiens

It’s a strange, strange world. If you have any doubts about that, Pavel Cuzuioc’s kaleidoscopic and empathetic sci-fi documentary about a group of people living and working around an isolated special astrophysical observatory in the Caucasus Mountains will convince you. It all begins with a rotating wooden house which serves as a kind of marker for what is to follow, for nothing is stable in this film. The director observes his arguing, philosophising protagonists performing and discussing Shakespeare, riding their mountain bikes and cohabiting with goats, while they talk of their aspirations to find black holes and extra-terrestrial signals. He lets them speak, the camera just there to witness and to be amazed. Taken together with the protagonists, these seemingly disparate elements come to form a sort of cosmology that alludes to both a romantic quest for imagination as well as a dangerous, momentous tendency for “made in Russia” megalomania. Tellingly, a whif of Soviet nostalgia is to be discovered in almost every frame. It’s a thin line between apotheosis and romantic dreams, ignorance and care, and Cuzuioc documents precisely this ambivalence on what feels like the eve of global political collapse. (John Divney)

In the presence of Pavel Cuzuioc.

Pavel Cuzuioc: DIGGING FOR LIFE (2011), RAISA (2015, K), SECONDO ME (2016), PLEASE HOLD THE LINE (2020)