Afronauts is an atmospheric short film about a girl preparing to go into space, as Zambia tries to beat the U.S. to be the first on the moon.
The film has this early sci-fi feel, filmed in black-and-white on the rocky gravel of a quarry. The homemade aluminium spacesuit made for the main character has that classic 50s look. That style has been so spoofed in the interceding decades that watching it from the 2020s, you are not sure if it’s meant to be comical. It inspires both a sincere nostalgia, and also a melancholy for imagined futures now past. That mixture of being almost laughably strange and humblingly sincere pervades the film, with the girl being rolled downhill in a barrel as weightlessness training.
As the hour of take-off approaches, I became apprehensive about how much of what we were seeing was real, in world. Within the world of the film, was a 4-foot metal tube enough to launch a person to the moon? Or would this come crashing down into insufficiently magical reality?
Using the language of sci-fi, Afronauts evokes a hopeful innocence, a harkening back to a childhood of possibilities. It is by turns comforting and unsettling, as this young girl places her life in the hands of those driven more by belief than experience. Interesting film.