A new Icelandic documentary about the Apollo lunar missions will premiere on July 20 this year, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s first step on the alien world. The film, named Cosmic birth, is co-produced by the Húsavík Exploration Museum and will look at the human side of the Moon missions and the men who took the first steps on another world.
“There have been countless documentaries about the Apollo lunar missions, but our goal with Cosmic Birth is to look at the human side of these missions”, says filmmaker Rafnar Orri.
The film is written by Orly Orlyson and Rafnar Orri, and co-produced by Fridrik Sigurdsson. Orly is the founder and director of the Exploration Museum in Húsavík. The Apollo astronauts were sent to the north of Iceland in 1965 and 1967 for geology field training, to better prepare them for their work on the surface of the Moon.
Through his work at the Exploration Museum, Orly has become friends with many of the Apollo moonwalkers and their families, as well as many of the people who worked behind the scenes to make this ancient dream of going to the moon a reality in 1969. He tells the story from a human prospective, focusing less on the techincal achivement and more on the human achivement of going to the moon.
The fillm tells of how the trips to the moon changed those 12 men who went there, and even more importantly how these men took an entire species to another world, changing our whole understanding of our place in the universe. The story is told through interviews with 6 of the Apollo astronauts and the family of Neil Armstrong, as well as through visuals and an original score composed for the film by Andri Freyr Arnarsson, Óskar Andri Ólafsson and rafnar.