IMDb meta-data is 30m runtime, rated 7.0 by 83 cinemtiazens.
Genre: Docudrama Sy Fy.
DNA: Romania.
Verdict: curiouser and curiouser.
Tagline: Did she make it to retirement age?
Carpathian folklore has it that upon death souls migrate to the Moon and at the full moon they return to Earth briefly. Gulp! Undead indeed.
It starts on 19 June 1969 in a retrospective from 1998.
A top secret Soviet mission to beat the USA to the Moon went awry on that date, contrary to For All Mankind (2019). The timing of the Apollo mission was well publicised and to get there first the Soviets had to cut corners even with the low bid comrades. The only cosmonaut willing to volunteer to sit on the duct-taped rocket was Ulyana Markovskaya, the story goes. So off she went sitting on 45,000 kilonewtons of explosives. (Dunno what that means but it sounds big.)
It is her badly burned helmet that falls to the Earth (from the Moon shot) in the Carpathian Mountains, where a hiker, hearing a boom somewhere in the distance, chances upon it still smouldering.
Most of the film is a talking head narrating events in retrospect.
As the film ends we see Ulyana (sans helmet) descending on a parachute. Whew! What happened? She survived the big bang, but did she survive Transylvania? Did she meet a count? Vlad happened next? There is a contemporary Russian actress of that name. Is she a descendant from this descender? These and others questions await the sequel.
The footage of the mountain hike is marvellous and the interspersed Soviet cosmonaut poster art is inspirational. The posters reminded me of a retro 1960s restaurant where we once ate in Moscow that was replete with stirring Soviet propaganda posters of the period, including some celebrating cosmonauts.
***
What the point is of Ulyana’s story is anyone’s guess. The few reviews on the IMDb did not add to my comprehension. This one was hard to locate.