Festivals - Gerardmer 2021 : Sputnik will be screened

By Mulder, 22 january 2021

Sputnik is a 2020 Russian science fiction horror film directed by Egor Abramenko for his directorial debut. It stars Oksana Akinshina, a young doctor recruited by the army to evaluate a cosmonaut who survived a mysterious space accident and returned to Earth with a dangerous organism living inside him. Alongside Akinshina, the film has Pyotr Fyodorov and Fyodor Bondarchuk in its cast. Sputnik was scheduled to have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2020, before the festival was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The film was released on video-on-demand in Russia on April 23, 2020 and received generally positive reviews.

The main shooting of the film took place in Moscow during winter 2018-2019. Most scenes of the film were shot at the Shemyakin-Ovchinnikov Institute of Bio-Organic Chemistry in Russia.

Born in 1987 in Rostov-on-Don in Russia, Egor Abramenko graduated from a film school in 2009, and has directed numerous commercials and multi-channel music videos. In 2016, he works as a second team director on the science fiction film Attraction by Fedor Bondarchuk. The following year, he made the short film Passenger, which deals with the problem of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sputnik, based on his short, is his first feature film.

Synopsis :
In the middle of the Cold War, a Soviet spaceship crashes after being damaged. Its captain is the only survivor. A renowned psychologist is dispatched to assess the cosmonaut's mental state. She realizes that he did not return to Earth alone...

Sputnik
Directed by Egor Abramenko
Produced by Mikhail Vrubel, Aleksandr Andryushchenko, Fyodor Bondarchuk, Ilya Stewart, Murad Osmann, Pavel Burya, Vyacheslav Murugov, Alina Tyazhlova, Michael Kitaev, Ilya Jincharadze
Written by Oleg Malovichko, Andrei Zolotarev
Starring Oksana Akinshina, Fyodor Bondarchuk, Pyotr Fyodorov, Anton Vasiliev
Music by Oleg Karpachev
Cinematography: Maxim Zhukov
Edited by Aleksandr Puzyryov, Egor Tarasenko
Production company: Vodorod Pictures, Art Pictures Studio, Hype Film, National Media Group Studio, STS
Distributed by Sony Pictures
Release date: April 23, 2020 (Russia)
Running time: 113 minutes

(Source: press release)