First Orbit

The monumental journey made by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who 50 years ago became the first man in space. To celebrate the pioneer’s round-the-world tour aboard the Vostok 1, director Christopher Riley has recreated Gagarin’s voyage for his 108-minute film First Orbit. Riley worked with the European Space Agency and the International Space Station to calculate the exact times that the station’s orbital path lined up with the Vostok’s original route, which started from the launch site in Kazakhstan, and took in the Pacific Ocean night sky past Chile and the South Atlantic into sunrise, before finally heading north-eastwards over Africa and ending with a parachute landing in Saratov, Russia. Astronaut Paolo Nespoli filmed the majority of the high-definition footage, which is woven together with historic recordings of Gagarin and an original score by composer Philip Sheppard.