'Baikonur, Earth', a documentary premiering at the Panorama Europe Film Festival, surveys the facility that launched Sputnik.

How do we live in the wreckage of our old utopias? What do we do with our aging technological ventures? What does it mean to be frozen in time as we approach 2020, a year that once evoked a far off space age future? In superbly shot and edited sequences, Andrea Sorini’s documentary examines these questions with quiet foreboding. The film will have its US premiere this Friday at the Museum of the Moving Image’s 2019 Panorama Europe Film Festival.

Almost half the film dwells in a desert region of Kazakhstan, near the site of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the world’s first spaceport.

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From Baikonur, Earth
From Baikonur, Earth - Through sequences featuring the first Christian icons in space, the ruins of mosques, and adherents of the ancient religion Tengrism, Baikonur, Earth puts forth a complex understanding of the past, future, and present. Ultimately, the film makes the viewer question what’s more otherworldly: a planet we’ve never visited, or our own? © The Piranesi Experience