Russian Actress, Filmmaker Shoot First Movie In Space

Kazakhstan:17/10/21: Russian actress Yulia Peresild and film director Klim Shipenko returned to Earth today after spending 12 days on the International Space Station (ISS) shooting scenes for the first movie in orbit.

Peresild and Shipenko landed as scheduled on Kazakhstan’s steppe at 04:36 GMT, according to footage broadcast live by the Russian space agency.

They were ferried back to terra firma by cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who had been on the space station for the past six months.

The filmmakers had blasted off from the Russia-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan earlier this month, traveling to the ISS with veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov to film scenes for ‘The Challenge’.

If the project stays on track, the Russian crew will beat a Hollywood project announced last year by ‘Mission Impossible’ star Tom Cruise together with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The movie’s plot, which has been mostly kept under wraps along with its budget, centers around a surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut.

Shkaplerov, 49, along with the two Russian cosmonauts who were already aboard the ISS are said to have cameo roles in the film.