One of the sad truths about our current distribution system is that many unique films are overlooked by distributors in favor of movies deemed more "marketable." Such was the case with Interkosmos, the wholly original debut feature from Chicago video artist Jim Finn. Finn uses a faux documentary format to tell the story of an apocryphal Eastern bloc space mission to colonize the outer reaches of our solar system- not exactly the most commercial of projects. But Interkosmos is so wonderfully strange that it deserves to find a cult audience on DVD.
Why we missed it: After making the festival rounds last year, Interkosmos only played a handful of theatrical venues, so it's not like we were the only once who bypassed it.
Unless the names Nandini Khaund and Ruediger van den Boom mean anything to you, there aren't any name actors to be found in the cast.
Why we should have known: Interkosmos was buzzed about at every festival it played, even receiving a rave from that connoisseur of the esoteric, Guy Maddin.
The most popular pitch for the film was "Wes Anderson in space," which isn't exactly a dead-on description but should at least clue you in to Finn's comic wavelength.
Why we ended up kicking ourselves: Finn's brand of comedy is almost bone-dry, but it's also blissfully offbeat, and in a movie comprised largely from stock footage and flat-voiced narration, the tangents are what make Interkosmos truly special. Along with descriptions of the crew's mission agenda, there's footage from a German kids' special called Kosmoschweinchen ("The Space Pig"), a description of a program by which the cosmonauts en route are made to watch recorded images of Earth in order to combat cabin fever, and archival radio transmissions that include such morbid bons mots at "If you cut a squirrel in half, all you get is blood and fur."
Not content to tell the film in documentary style, Finn also adhered to the rules of the classical Hollywood musical, with one musical number every eight to twelve minutes. Even with his limited resources, Finn accomplishes this with the help of Jim Becker and Colleen Burke's Teutonic garage-rock score. The musical numbers include a sequence involving two women's field hockey teams, footage of the cosmonauts exercising onboard, and most memorably, cosmonaut Falcon (played by Finn) serenading cosmonaut Seagull (Khaund) by radio with that "capitalist love song," "The Trolley Song."
Amidst the quirkiness, Interkosmos also contains a surprisingly moving romance between Falcon and Seagull, albeit a particularly communist one in which they sacrifice their own feelings for the cause.
Why we might have been better off without it: With a story set behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War, and a DVD package that prominently features the hammer and sickle emblem, watching Interkosmos could very well get you put on an FBI watch list even today. But don't let that discourage you. . .
— Paul Clark