Space Tourists
Switzerland | 2009 | 58 min
Documentary filmmaker Christian Frei gets inside the minds of a disparate group of billionaires willing to pay top dollar to be among the first civilians to journey beyond the limitations of our atmosphere and into outer space. Frei’s film is less a chronicle of the futuristic technologies that make space travel accessible — at least to the extremely wealthy — than an exploration of human hubris and our unquenchable thirst for adventure.
Featuring breathtaking images, Space Tourists takes viewers into a fascinating world full of wonder and surprise.
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DIR Christian Frei
CAST Anousheh Ansari, Jonas Bendiksen, Dumitru Popescu, Charles Simonyi
Official site Won, 2010 Sundance Film Festival – World Cinema Directing Award Documentary
Christian Frei’s engrossing, seductive, and hauntingly gorgeous portrait of modern society coursing though a time of accelerating space travel implodes futuristic fantasies of “space-tourism” and offers perspectives on space travel that both glow with other-worldly wonder, and sweat with the earthly friction of the hunger for adventure and discovery grinding against the human need to survive. I felt my world expand and contract all at once.
—Shari Frilot, Sundance Institute
