ABOUT

Citizens of the Cosmos is a new film by Anton Vidokle based on the manifesto of Biocosmism, written by Alexander Svyatogor in 1922. Shot on locations in Tokyo and Kiev, in collaboration with a group of amateur actors, volunteers and extras, the film presents an imagined community voicing historical desires of Russian Cosmism—immortality, resurrection of the dead and interplanetarism—all set in everyday life in contemporary Japan. Using urban shrines, cemeteries, a crematorium, tatami rooms, a bamboo forest, an industrial gas plant and city streets as an open air stage, the film gradually narrates the text of the biocosmist manifesto while presenting a sequence of dream-like tableaus, featuring rejuvenation through blood transfusion, funerary processions and demonstrations, the Danse Macabre, the cremation bone picking ceremony, attempts to communicate with the dead using stethoscopes, and a theremin orchestra recital, among other scenes. Set to an original music score composed by Alva Noto, Citizens of the Cosmos is an experiment in defamiliarisation: a speculative test of the universality implicit in Cosmism’s premise when projected outside of the sphere of Russian language, geography, tradition and culture.