Moscow, 1921… People start receiving strange messages from space: Martians, who have invented a telescope to watch the Earth, seem to be very interested in the life of its inhabitants. Martian queen Aelita is especially interested in an engineer named Los and his wife Natasha.
Inspired by Russian futurism, Aelita became one of the main sci-fi pictures of silent cinema and one of the first cinematic masterpieces of Soviet constructivism. Costumes for the film were designed by "the amazon of the Russian avant-garde" Aleksandra Ekster, and the architecture of the Martian city is reminiscent of the famous Tatlin’s Tower. Driven by the energy of 1917, the film paradoxically used its artistic achievements to create a bourgeois Mars of excess rejected by simple Soviet scientists. Once on the red planet, Soviet inventors start a revolution, liberate Martian workers, and create the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Mars.
The film will be screened to live music.
Aelita
Director Yakov Protazanov
USSR, 1924. 113 min. 16+
