A state-funded Russian movie telling the story of Yuri Gagarin, the first human to enter space, has been criticised as a sanitised biopic.
The 108-minute film Gagarin: First Man in Space is the first full film on the pioneering cosmonaut ever released in the Soviet Union and recreates Gagarin's pioneering April 1961 space voyage in detail.
The film received state funding as part of a drive for patriotic cinema and has been supported by Gagarin's family – his widow and two daughters, Yelena and Galina. The family previously vetoed a Gagarin musical and took legal action over a previous fictional drama, forcing all references to Gagarin to be cut.
Yuri Gagarin with his wife Valentina and daughters Galina and Yelena in June 1963 in Moscow
In director Pavel Parkhomenko's new film, the cosmonaut (played by Yaroslav Zhalnin) is shown as a flawless character, a portrayal that has attracted criticism. "Any humanity is carefully hidden from us. We stop believing at all in the existence of the person named Gagarin," was the verdict of Ogonyok magazine. A reviewer on the TV channel Rain accused Parkhomenko of having "made a deadly retro film as if he was turning a feature from (Soviet mouthpiece daily) Pravda into a film".
Producer Oleg Kapanets defended the film and was quoted in an AFP report by Anna Malpas saying: "At first the Gagarin family were suspicious because before there were attempts to make films and it somehow didn't work out. For them this is a delicate topic and there have always been a lot of unnecessary rumours and sensation around it. They had even stopped believing that it was possible to make honest cinema. But time passed and they were OK with it all."
He said he asked Gagarin's daughters to check with their mother Valentina – who is rarely seen in public – on details such as what flowers Gagarin used to give her (in the film, it is chrysanthemums).
The capsule that brought Yuri Gagarin back to earth before he parachuted out at 7,000ft
The film ends as Gagarin parachutes back to Earth, without touching on his later years of socialising with Soviet pop stars and world figures such as Queen Elizabeth II. Neither does it refer to his death at 34 in a plane crash. There were numerous conspiracy theories about his death, ranging from claims Gagarin was drunk to allegations that the accident, which happened while he was flying a MiG-15 fighter jet in 1968, was somehow staged by jealous Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. But a study in 2010 claimed Gagarin's death during a routine training flight was caused by his panicked reaction after realising an air vent in his cockpit was open.
In any case, the new film has won praise from Russian Space Agency officials who watched it in Moscow. "It got through to me, I'll be honest, it was great," said head of manned flight programmes at Roscosmos, Alexei Krasnov. "We still know how to make films – not just rockets."
