123 – Moon (2009)

spacetime coordinates: 2035, Sarang Station, automated lunar facility 

Koch Media DVD Cover Templat

Moon is a 2009 British science fiction drama film co-written and directed by Duncan Jones. The film follows Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), a man who experiences a personal crisis as he nears the end of a three-year solitary stint mining helium-3 on the far side of the Moon. It was the feature debut of director Duncan Jones. Kevin Spacey voices Sam’s robot companion, GERTY.

Jones described the intent: “[We] wanted to create something which felt comfortable within that canon of those science fiction films from the sort of late seventies to early eighties.” The director spoke of his interest in the lunar setting: “for me, the Moon has this weird mythic nature to it…. There is still a mystery to it. As a location, it bridges the gap between science-fiction and science fact. We (humankind) have been there. It is something so close and so plausible and yet at the same time, we really don’t know that much about it.”

The director described the lack of romance in the Moon as a location, citing images from the Japanese lunar orbiter SELENE: “It’s the desolation and emptiness of it…it looks like some strange ball of clay in blackness…. Look at photos and you’ll think that they’re monochrome. In fact, they’re not. There simply are no primary colours.” Jones made reference to the photography book Full Moon by Michael Light in designing the look of the film.

Jones is planning a follow-up film, titled Mute, which will serve as an epilogue to Moon. “Sam has agreed to do a little cameo in the next film”, said Jones, who ultimately hopes to complete a trilogy of films set in the same fictional universe.

reception from the scientific community

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182345/

0091 – In the Realms of the Unreal (2004)

spacetime coordinates: 1892–1973 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. 

In the Realms of the Unreal is a 2004 documentary film directed by Jessica Yu about American outsider artist Henry Darger.

An obscure janitor during his life, Darger is known for the posthumous discovery of his elaborate 15,145-page fantasy manuscript entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with several hundred watercolor paintings and other drawings illustrating the story.

The film’s style is atypical of a documentary. Because there are only three known photographs of Darger, and because of his reclusive lifestyle, the film is mostly a narrated biographical account, accompanied by animated versions of events from his magnum opus, which is also surveyed in detail. Interviews with his few neighbors and other acquaintances are included.

In the last entry in his diary, he wrote: “January 1, 1971. I had a very poor nothing like Christmas. Never had a good Christmas all my life, nor a good new year, and now… I am very bitter but fortunately not revengeful, though I feel should be how I am…”

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0086 – Poll (2010)

spacetime coordinates: 1914 Estonia

The Poll Diaries (German: Poll) is a 2010 German drama film directed by Chris Kraus  loose adaptation of the diaries written by poetess Oda Schaefer combining a coming-of-age story about a precocious 14 year-old girl with the apocalyptic end of an era.

In the summer of 1914, fourteen-year-old Oda von Siering (Paula Beer) leaves Berlin to join her family and an assortment of German and Russian aristocrats on an estate in Estonia. The von Siering family home is a character in its own right, a hulking, neoclassical manor that hovers on stilts above the sea.

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085 – Childhood’s End (TV Mini-Series 2015)

Childhood’s End is an American television miniseries based on the novel of the same name, by Arthur C. Clarke, and developed by Matthew Graham. It premiered on Syfy on December 14, 2015.

After peaceful aliens invade earth, humanity finds itself living in a utopia under the indirect rule of the aliens, but does this utopia come at a price?

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070 – In Darkness (2011)

spacetime coordinates: June 1943 – July 1944  Lwów city, Poland

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In Darkness (Polish: W ciemności) is a 2011 Polish drama film directed by Agnieszka Holland. Dedicated to Marek Edelman, the film is a Polish-German-Canadian coproduction, with a screenplay by Canadian writer David F. Shamoon. In Darkness is based on the book In the Sewers of Lvov (1990) by Robert Marshall. The only living survivor of the group, Krystyna Chiger, has written a memoir of her experience, The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’s Shadow (2008), which was published too late to be a source

Based on true events during German occupation of Poland, the film tells a story of Leopold Socha, a sewer worker in the then Polish city of Lwów (taken after World War II by the Soviet Union, and now part of Ukraine), who used his knowledge of the city’s sewer system to shelter a group of Jews escaped from Lwów’s ghetto during the German extermination of Jewish people.

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“‘These were terrible times’: the true story behind In Darkness”

069 – Total Eclipse (1995)

spacetime coordinates: 19th century  France – Brussels – Abyssinia

“The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.“

Total Eclipse is a 1995 film directed by Agnieszka Holland, based on a 1967 play by Christopher Hampton, who also wrote the screenplay. Based on letters and poems, it presents a historically accurate account of the passionate and violent relationship between the two 19th-century French poets Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio), at a time of soaring creativity for both of them.

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0058 – Alexander (2004)

spacetime coordinates: 4th century BC Macedonia // India // Babylon // Arabia // Persian Empire // Battle of Gaugamela // Battle of Hydaspes

Alexander is a 2004 epic historical drama film based on the life of Alexander the Great. It was directed by Oliver Stone, with Colin Farrell in the title role.

The film was an original screenplay based in part on the book Alexander the Great, written in the 1970s by the University of Oxford historian Robin Lane Fox.

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