Hello space fans,

We are writing with a special invitation to an online screening of Cosmographies, a new speculative documentary fiction film! Cosmographies is directed by JustSpace board member Juan Francisco Salazar, who will be present for a Q&A following the film, in consultation with Toconao Indigenous Lickanantay Community, Salar de Atacama, Chile. The screening will take place on Friday, October 17 at 7pm CT (UT-5).

This event is free, but you must register to attend at bit.ly/JustSpaceCosmo

More about Cosmographies:

The struggle for environmental justice against ongoing forms of extractivism and ecological ruin in the Atacama Desert is an allegory against ongoing plans to colonise the Moon and Mars, where Māori astrobiologist Xuê Noon finds solace in 2051.

Synopsis

Cosmographies is a hybrid film that draws from modes of speculative fiction, observational and poetic documentary, activism, and Indigiqueer approaches. Māori astrobiologist Xuê Noon (played by Australian/Māori artist Victoria Hunt) finds solace in Mars in 2051 as a leader from the Aotearoa Space Agency on an international scientific mission, following the discovery of dormant microorganisms by the NASA Mars Sample Return Mission in 2039. Xuê wanders across this sentient planet and reflects on the newly found lifeforms as she grows plants in a glasshouse. Through the spirit of an ancient taniwha, she slipstreams in spacetime to the Atacama Desert and to Aotearoa.

In Atacama the film engages with numerous ongoing life-and-death struggles for land and water justice led by Indigenous communities, activists, and scientists in this old, vital yet scarred desert. Through interviews and conversations, the film depicts centuries old and ongoing forms of social injustice and ecological degradation to weave a critical allegory against the renewed commercial impulse of a new space age rampaging in the 2020’s.

Xuê is not returning to Earth. She reads fragments from a diary she has titled Cosmographies. As she contemplates her own death on Mars (becoming stardust) Xuê slipstreams one final time to visit her younger self in Rotorua, Aotearoa, during a cold August night in 2003, when Earth and Mars were at their closest in 60,000 years. The film brings a message urging us to support land and water defenders in the Atacama desert and to rethink the cosmos not as a frontier to conquer, but as a delicate ecology to which our planet is intimately and ancestrally connected.

Produced in consultation with Toconao Indigenous Lickanantay Community, Salar de Atacama, Chile.