Out of the Present

Andrei Ujica’s Out of the Present was screened in Rotterdam in 1996 and was a great success with audiences at the time. The reason for screening the film again is the fact that the renowned German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk is to give a lecture about the film in Rotterdam. Sloterdijk made his name in 1983 with his book Critique of Cynical Reason, the best-selling German philosophical work since the war and later he published his trilogy Sphären (1998-2003). Out of the Present is a brilliant found-footage film. The archive material that Ujica uses is in itself fascinating, but he managed to edit this material in such a way that the film also acquires the air of a thriller. Apollo 13, but then more real and exciting. In May 1991, Anatoli Arzebarski and Sergei Krikalev, two Soviet cosmonauts on the Ozone mission, were sent into orbit to the MIR space station. While one of the two was allowed to return to earth on the agreed day five months later, the other crewman had to stay on due to political indecisiveness back home. Ten months after leaving the Soviet Union, he returned to Russia. During his absence, there was a failed putsch in Moscow which led to the change in the name of his homeland and the end of an era. The start of the film is simple, the motif classical: an odyssey. (EH)

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