The Journey to Callisto

At the beginning of the 22nd century, a Russian crew made up of nuclear physicists and astrobiologists, engineers and pilots are on an expedition to Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons. Travelling through deep space, they are all alone with each other on the spaceship Zimodorok I. In the corridors and cabins, the lab and the kitchen, the crew talk about everyday issues such as how to make the perfect noodle soup, trouble with the tax authorities or what film they should watch in the evening. But their conversations also touch upon the big existential questions, desires and fears, love and death. Drifting for days, months, years through a cosmos that steers them towards chaos, Michel Decar’s characters experience the chaos of their own emotions; they are confronted with the senselessness of their existence which is both liberating and unbearable. And somewhere, on and off, they hear a quiet constant creaking.

In a kaleidoscopic assembly of 66 moments, Michel Decar beams the ideas of the bourgeois drama of around 1900 two hundred years into the future, for a high-precision landing in our present time. He uses this distance, and the friction of two diametrically opposed genres, to portray humans, lovingly and with insubordinate humour, as both ridiculous and tragic, no matter how much external conditions may have changed.