The Other Side of Mars

Minna Långström / Finland / 2019 / Central European Premiere / 55 min.

synopsis

Every day, Vandana Verma travels across the face of Mars, taking pictures of its surface – all the while never leaving a NASA laboratory in Pasadena, California, from where she controls the Curiosity rover. This engrossing essayistic documentary joins her and other experts in space research in meditating over images of a planet located tens of millions of kilometers from Earth. Mars thus becomes the ideal place for studying our paradoxical relationship to photographs and for contemplating whether images from space (or also from various places on our planet) present us with reality or whether they actually create an alternate reality that we should approach far more cautiously.

“Martian imagery reveal as much about our relationship to images as they tell us about Mars itself. This film aims to make the spectral quality of. an image materialize in front of us.” M. Långström

biography

Minna Långström (1974) is a Finnish director whose short films have been shown at festivals in Tampere, Uppsala, and Chicago, among other places. She also uses film as one element in the immersive art installations she has exhibited at numerous galleries throughout the world. She frequently explores the role of media and technology in our lives, as well as what stories they tell about the world around us.