Interkosmos

With his docudrama Interkosmos, American writer-director Jim Finn creates a testament to an apocryphal East German 1970s space project. Finn intercuts recreations of phony newsreel footage (passed off as the real thing) with elaborate musical numbers. The farcical premise has the Communist DDR - historically, a close ally of Leonid Brezhnev - striving to colonize the moons of Jupiter and Saturn ahead of its capitalist enemies from the U.S. Against this backdrop, the director posits the burgeoning romance of a male and female cosmonaut - Falcon (Finn) and Seagull (Nadini Khaund) - who at one point burst into a flamboyant rendition of "The Trolley Song" from Meet Me in St. Louis. The structure itself is loose, freewheeling and episodic; Finn tints the images orange to create a nostalgic feel throughout.