The actor and director who filmed scenes for the professional feature drama The Challenge in space have returned to Earth after 12 days in orbit aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The Soyuz MS-18 space capsule safely landed in Kazakhstan with Oleg Novitskiy, Yulia Peresild and Klim Shipenko onboard.
Veteran Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, actor Yulia Peresild and film producer Klim Shipenko travelled to the ISS to film segments of the movie 'Challenge', a Russian production that was still awaiting completion at the time of this October 2021 report.
Challenge will tell the story of a surgeon who is required to carry out surgery on a cosmonaut whose medical condition prevents them from returning to Earth.
On initially reaching the ISS Peresild said:
"Everything was new to us today, every 30 seconds brought something entirely new. It is almost impossible to think that this all came to reality. I also feel like I'm still dreaming."
While Shkaplerov added:
"We had a small delay. Thank you to you who taught us how to make decisions. Everything went just fine, and now we're looking forward to our work on orbit. (Peresild and Shipenko) helped. They knew what to do, they were aware of the situation. Everything was done exactly the way it was required by their training."
While many recordings have previously been made in space, including documentaries, no commercial movie has ever been filmed by actors and film crew while in space.
The Russians were not the only ones to have ambitions to film a commercial movie in space. In 2020 it was revealed that US Hollywood star Tom Cruise was working with both NASA and SpaceX to organise a movie in space. The Russian production reached its orbital filming milestone first.
The news of the 'Challenge' movie comes in the same year as a private suborbital passenger flight took place onboard Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket, and a flight into orbit by SpaceX, carrying the Inspiration4 crew on a three-day orbital mission.
In the same week in October 2021, William Shatner, who famously played Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek series, became the oldest man to ever enter space, aged 90.
[Based on reporting by: Reuters]
The return flight and the film shoot are separate milestones
NASA’s October 17, 2021 imagery identifies the departing Soyuz MS-18 crew as Oleg Novitskiy, Yulia Peresild and Klim Shipenko. That provides a concrete mission record for the return described here. The broader filmmaking story concerns a professional dramatic production using the station as a location. It should be distinguished from the many earlier recordings made in space, including documentary footage. A claim about a particular kind of production is narrower and more informative than saying that nobody had previously made a movie in orbit. NASA’s October 2021 Soyuz MS-18 record.
An orbital location changes how a scene can be planned
The 2021 account describes a limited visit inside an operating space station. For a reader thinking about production, that raises specific questions: which scenes truly needed that location, how many people were available to perform and film them, and how would those shots connect with material produced elsewhere? An announcement that scenes have been recorded does not by itself establish the release date or final contents of the finished work. Preserving the 2021 perspective also helps keep separate several different activities mentioned in the report: a stay aboard the ISS, a free-flying orbital mission and a brief suborbital flight.
Update: the film’s release
The Challenge (Vyzov), with scenes shot aboard the International Space Station by actor Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko, opened in cinemas in Russia and other post-Soviet states on 20 April 2023, becoming the first feature film with scenes shot in orbit to reach release.
Sources: collectSPACE, 24 April 2023: Shot in space, feature film “The Challenge” opens
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