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      Gérard Depardieu, Friend of Putin, Denounces ‘Fratricidal War’

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      “Stop the weapons and negotiate,” the French actor and staunch Russia ally told a news agency.For the past decade, the French actor Gérard Depardieu has been one of the closest Western celebrities to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.In 2013, the movie star became a Russian citizen to avoid taxes in France. In a letter to Russian state television at the time, Mr. Depardieu said, “I love your president, Vladimir Putin, very much and it’s mutual.” Mr. Putin awarded Mr. Depardieu Russian citizenship at a special dinner that year.As tensions between Russia and Ukraine were growing last month, Mr. Depardieu even went on French television to say, “Leave Vladimir alone.”Now, Mr. Depardieu has taken a surprising step toward ruining that cherished friendship when, on Tuesday, the actor denounced the war in Ukraine in an interview with Agence France-Presse, the French news service. “Russia and Ukraine have always been brother countries,” Mr. Depardieu said. “I am against this fratricidal war,” he added. “I say, ‘Stop the weapons and negotiate.’”Best known for 1990s movies including “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “Green Card,” Mr. Depardieu later posted part of his statement on Instagram. His agent did not respond to an interview request.Mr. Depardieu’s comments are unlikely to change many Ukrainians’ views of the actor. In 2015, the Ukrainian government included Mr. Depardieu on a list of cultural figures who were a threat to the country’s security. It did not state a reason, but Ukrainian newspapers linked the decision to comments Mr. Depardieu had made questioning Ukraine’s independence. In 2014, at the Baltic Pearl movie festival in Latvia, Mr. Depardieu told reporters that he loved both Russia and “Ukraine, which is part of Russia.”The French tax exile is not the only famous actor to have taken Russian citizenship: Steven Seagal, the American-born star of action movies like “Under Siege,” was naturalized in 2016. On Thursday, Mr. Seagal’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request to discuss the actor’s views on the war in Ukraine.In recent years, Mr. Depardieu has been in the news for controversies aside from his Russia connections. In 2018, French prosecutors investigated rape allegations against him, but dropped the case the following year because of a lack of evidence. More

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      Valery Gergiev Faces Removal From Podiums Over Support for Putin

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      A day after he was dropped from concerts at Carnegie Hall, the star Russian maestro Valery Gergiev on Friday faced rising anger over his record of support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, with several leading European institutions — including the Munich Philharmonic, of which Mr. Gergiev is chief conductor — threatening to sever ties with him unless he denounced Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.The fallout, encompassing Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, was a rare rebuke of a titan of the classical music industry, and it reflected growing global outrage over Mr. Putin’s ongoing military offensive in Ukraine.Mr. Gergiev, 68, one of Russia’s most prominent cultural ambassadors, is now being shunned because of his ties to Mr. Putin, his longtime friend and benefactor. He seems in peril of losing several key posts, including the podium in Munich and his position as honorary conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.Munich’s mayor, Dieter Reiter, issued an ultimatum on Friday, saying Mr. Gergiev must denounce the “brutal war of aggression that Putin is waging against Ukraine” before Monday or be fired by the orchestra, three years before his contract is set to expire.The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra offered a similar warning, threatening to cancel its “Gergiev Festival,” planned for September. The Teatro alla Scala in Milan said Mr. Gergiev would be dropped from upcoming performances of Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” and other engagements if he did not immediately call for peace.And after Carnegie Hall and the Vienna Philharmonic announced on Thursday that Mr. Gergiev would no longer lead the orchestra in three high-profile concerts starting Friday evening, Carnegie on Friday canceled two concerts by the Mariinsky Orchestra in May that were to have been led by Mr. Gergiev.Mr. Gergiev did not respond to requests for comment from The New York Times.The uproar was a significant blow to a conductor who has built a busy international career while maintaining deep ties to the Russian state, including in his role as general and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.Mr. Putin has been critical to Mr. Gergiev’s success, providing funding to his theater and showering him with awards. Mr. Gergiev has emerged as a prominent supporter of Mr. Putin, endorsing his re-election and appearing at concerts in Russia and abroad to promote his policies. The two have known each other since the early 1990s, when Mr. Putin was an official in St. Petersburg and Mr. Gergiev was beginning his tenure as the leader of the Mariinsky, then called the Kirov.Western cultural institutions have largely looked beyond Mr. Gergiev’s ties to Mr. Putin, even as the conductor became the target of repeated protests over the past decade, at Carnegie, the Metropolitan Opera and elsewhere.Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine this week put new pressure on arts leaders to reconsider their ties to Mr. Gergiev. After a hastily arranged meeting on Thursday morning, Carnegie Hall and the Vienna Philharmonic made the announcement that the orchestra would go on without him. The Russian pianist Denis Matsuev, who had been scheduled to perform with Mr. Gergiev and the Philharmonic on Friday, and who has expressed support for Mr. Putin’s policies in the past, was also taken off the program.Understand Russia’s Attack on UkraineCard 1 of 7What is at the root of this invasion? More

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      in Theater

      After Being Stuck in Russia, Kirill Serebrennikov Directs a Play in Germany

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      Kirill Serebrennikov is living under a three-year travel ban, but to his surprise, Russian authorities approved his request to direct a play in Hamburg.HAMBURG, Germany — At first glance, a recent rehearsal at the Thalia Theater here looked much like any other. Onstage, the actors ran through the final scene of a play called “The Black Monk,” trying to get the flow just right.“Stop, stop, stop,” the director, Kirill Serebrennikov, cried from the middle of the auditorium. He wasn’t happy with the projections beamed onto moons suspended above the performers, and started to troubleshoot.It was business as usual in theater, but for Serebrennikov — one of Russia’s most prominent directors, whose stage work is produced across Europe — the chance to oversee the production in person was an unexpected surprise. It was the first time in more than four years that he had been able to set foot outside of his home country.Serebrennikov’s provocative stage work, which often deals with topics considered taboo in Russia, like homosexuality, has been seen as critical of life under President Vladimir V. Putin. Perhaps too critical, since for the last four and a half years Serebrennikov has been embroiled in a financial fraud case that is widely seen by Russia’s intelligentsia as part of a crackdown on artistic freedom.“The Black Monk” features a large cast of Russian, German, American, Armenian and Latvian actors, dancers and singers.Hayley Austin for The New York TimesBeginning in August 2017, Serebrennikov spent nearly 20 months under house arrest in Moscow, and was later convicted of embezzling around 133 million rubles, or around $2 million, in government funds allocated to a festival that was put on at the Gogol Center, the avant-garde theater Serebrennikov used to run. The high-profile court case resulted in a suspended sentence for the director in June 2020, but also a three-year ban on his traveling outside of Russia.So when the director arrived at Hamburg Airport on Jan. 8, Joachim Lux, the Thalia’s artistic director, greeted him with astonishment.In a statement issued by his theater, Lux sounded relieved, noting that his playhouse had overcome “all pandemic and political obstacles” to bring the director to Hamburg. He called the director’s safe arrival “a great miracle that gives strength in difficult times!”Among those most surprised was Serebrennikov himself.The director explained that his request to leave Russia so he could direct a production based on a little-known story by Anton Chekhov was unexpectedly approved, and on very short notice.Since his arrest, Serebrennikov has come up with inventive ways to direct from a distance. For “The Black Monk,” he was able to be there in person again.Hayley Austin for The New York Times“Please allow me to go to Hamburg for work,” the director had asked Russian officials, he said during a recent news conference in the foyer of the Thalia. It was the same standard request that the authorities had rejected numerous times before. However, earlier this month, “they just gave the permission for this project,” Serebrennikov said, adding that the authorization to travel came through at the very last minute.“They just signed the paper right after the New Year holidays,” said the 52-year-old director, dressed in black and wearing lightly tinted sunglasses and a baseball cap. “Probably I was a good guy, my behavior was good and that’s why they said OK,” he added.In an interview after the news conference, Serebrennikov said he had given up trying to understand exactly why he was let out of Russia to direct “The Black Monk.”“Here I am. I’m in Hamburg,” he said with a shrug. “We are creating theater together with a lot of very talented people in one of the best theaters in the world.”When he was unable to leave Russia, Serebrennikov found resourceful ways to keep his work going abroad. In November 2018, when he was still under house arrest and prohibited from using the internet, he directed a production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” at the Zurich Opera using a relay system for video files that involved a USB stick hand-delivered to him by his lawyer in Moscow.Similar technological workarounds have allowed him to remain highly prolific in captivity of one kind or another. Since the Zurich “Così,” he has also had artistic control of stage productions in Germany and Austria and completed two well-received films, “Leto,” in 2018, and “Petrov’s Flu” in 2021, both of which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, in the director’s absence.Filipp Avdeev, left, and Gurgen Tsaturyan in “The Black Monk.”Hayley Austin for The New York TimesIn much of Serebrennikov’s recent stage work, confinement has appeared as a central theme, including in his production of “Outside,” which played in Avignon and Berlin, and his 2021 staging of Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” at the Vienna State Opera, which was partially set in a prison. His production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s “The Nose,” which opened the current season at the Bavarian State Opera, featured scenes of state violence and repression in a dystopian yet oddly contemporary Russia.Serebrennikov speculated that being forced to practice his craft remotely over the months he spent under house arrest gave him an edge once the pandemic began. “It was my personal rehearsal for Corona,” he said with a wry laugh.Since his legal woes began in 2017, Serebrennikov has become an emblem of artistic freedom in the face of government repression. But the director said he was uncomfortable with this role. “I’m a working animal,” he said. “I don’t want to be a symbol.”Even by the director’s standards, “The Black Monk” is a challenging production. It features a large cast of Russian, German, American, Armenian and Latvian actors, dancers and singers, has dialogue in three languages and incorporates music by the Latvian composer Jekabs Nimanis.“We have not too much time,” Serebrennikov said of the two weeks he has in Hamburg to finish the production. And while he seemed glad to be back to “in person” directing, he said that working remotely is an artistically viable alternative.“We get used to having a lot of digital life around us,” he said. “Of course, personal presence is much more preferable for me, but Zoom is OK,” he added.“We are creating theater together with a lot of very talented people in one of the best theaters in the world,” Serebrennikov said of “The Black Monk.”Hayley Austin for The New York TimesAfter “The Black Monk,” Serebrennikov has a number of other international productions on the horizon, including an opera at this summer’s Holland Festival in Amsterdam, and a possible tour of “The Black Monk.” Whether he’ll be allowed to travel for either is unclear.“It could happen, but nobody knows,” he said. “I prefer to be in the moment and not to hope too much,” he added, alluding to his own legal predicament and the wider world’s battering by the pandemic.Under the conditions of his travel permit, Serebrennikov must return to Russia on Jan. 22, the day after “The Black Monk” opens. The director said he had every intention of going back to Moscow, where he will start work on a film that will be his first in English.“I’m a reliable person,” he said, adding that “the people who allowed me to leave are probably at risk as well.” More

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      Russian Film Crew Wraps Space Station Shoot and Returns to Earth

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      A Russian actress and film director landed near Russia’s spaceflight base in Kazakhstan after 12 days in orbit.A Russian actress and a film director landed safely on Earth early Sunday after spending 12 days aboard the International Space Station shooting scenes for the first feature-length drama made with scenes shot in space.Yulia Peresild, the actress, and Klim Shipenko, a film director, launched to space with a Russian astronaut on Oct. 5 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. They used the orbital laboratory as one of the main sets for their movie, “The Challenge,” a drama in which Ms. Peresild plays a surgeon embarking on an emergency mission to save the life of an ailing cosmonaut.The 12-day journey, backed by Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, was the latest act in a race among spacefaring countries to generate public excitement about human spaceflight and demonstrate that destinations like the space station aren’t exclusive to government astronauts. The mission also adds another superlative to Russia’s spaceflight record over the United States: beating Hollywood to orbit.Ms. Peresild, Mr. Shipenko and Oleg Novitsky, a Russian astronaut who’s been on the station since April and played the role of the film’s ailing cosmonaut, bid farewell to the station’s crew of seven on Saturday. The Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft that carried them back to Earth undocked at 9:14 p.m. Eastern time. The crew’s trip home took about three hours before landing at 10:35 a.m. local time in the desert steppe of Kazakhstan’s Karaganda Region.In live footage streamed by Russia’s space agency, helicopters from search and rescue teams circled the area where the astronauts were to set down, and mission controllers urged the crew to “get ready” and brace themselves for landing. Under a large parachute, the capsule touched down, sending up a cloud of dust.“They landed vertically, awesome guys,” said a mission controller from Russia, suggesting the capsule had not landed in a way that could add some difficulty to the crew’s exit.The Russian space agency said that the crew felt well ahead of their exit from the Soyuz, and would undergo a 10-day rehabilitation to help recover from the effects of living in the microgravity environment of low-earth orbit.The filming began as the movie crew arrived in space. Mr. Shipenko filmed scenes using hand-held cameras inside the capsule of another Soyuz module as it approached the station. When it docked, Pyotr Dubrov, one of the space station’s Russian astronauts, was waiting behind a large digital cinema camera as the crew emerged from their capsule and floated into the station for the first time. And on Saturday, the filming continued as the crew exited the station and boarded their capsule. Few details about the plot of “The Challenge” have been announced.But drama on the station turned real on Friday when it was tilted out of its position in orbit during a test of the thrusters on the capsule that ferried the film crew home to Earth. Mr. Novitsky had been testing out the engines, Roscosmos said, but they fired longer than expected, according to a NASA statement. The station, which is the size of a football field, was tilted 57 degrees out of position, according to Russian mission control officials quoted by Interfax, a Russian news agency.The incident sprang Russian and NASA officials into action, and they corrected the station’s positioning within 30 minutes. It was the second such emergency since July, when Russia’s new Nauka module erroneously fired its thrusters, shifting the station one and a half revolutions — about 540 degrees — before it came to a stop upside down.Whatever caused the problems with the spacecraft’s thruster on Friday did not recur as the film crew and Mr. Novitsky departed the station Saturday night.“The Soyuz is in good shape, was declared ready to support undocking and landing this evening, and everything is in order for the departure,” said Rob Navias, a NASA spokesman, during a livestream of the process.Russia’s space agency announced its intention last year to send an actress to the space station shortly after plans emerged that Tom Cruise would trek to space as part of an action-adventure film directed by Doug Liman. Jim Bridenstine, who served as NASA’s administrator under President Donald Trump, confirmed the plans on Twitter at the time, but no updates on the film project have emerged since that time. Other entertainment projects centered on the International Space Station may occur in the years to come, including a Discovery Channel reality TV competition called “Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?” More

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      Russian Film Crew Has Arrived at Space Station

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      The pair arrived at the International Space Station on Tuesday, aiming to shoot scenes for the first feature film made in orbit.The Russian crew — an actress, a director and their professional astronaut guide — arrived at the International Space Station with a mission to shoot scenes for the first feature-length film in space.Roscosmos, via ReutersThe first dog in space. The first man and woman. Now Russia has clinched another spaceflight first before the United States: Beating Hollywood to orbit.A Russian actress, Yulia Peresild, a director, Klim Shipenko, and their veteran Russian astronaut guide, Anton Shkaplerov, launched on a Russian rocket toward the International Space Station on Tuesday. Their mission is to shoot scenes for the first feature-length film in space. While cinematic sequences in space have long been portrayed on big screens using sound stages and advanced computer graphics, never before has a full-length movie been shot and directed in space.Whether the film they shoot in orbit is remembered as a cinematic triumph, the mission highlights the busy efforts of governments as well as private entrepreneurs to expand access to space. Earth’s orbit and beyond were once visited only by astronauts handpicked by government space agencies. But a growing number of visitors in the near future will be more like Ms. Sherepild and Mr. Shipenko, and less like the highly trained Mr. Shkaplerov and his fellow space explorers.A Soyuz rocket, the workhorse of Russia’s space program, lifted off on time at 4:55 a.m. Eastern time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.Before the launch on Tuesday, the MS-19 crew posed for photos and waved to family and fans in Baikonur. Mr. Shipenko, the director of the film which is named “The Challenge,” held up a script as he waved to cameras.“We didn’t forget to take it with us,” he said, according to a translator, before he boarded a bus with the other crew members to get dressed in their flight suits.The crew then raced to catch up with the space station in a trip that took only three hours. Known as a “two-orbit scheme,” it was unusually fast, as journeys to the lab in space typically last between eight and 22 hours over multiple orbits around Earth. (The first three-hour trip was performed by a Soyuz spacecraft in 2020 for Russia’s MS-17 mission, carrying two Russian astronauts and a U.S. astronaut.)The MS-19 spacecraft carrying its three-person crew was expected to dock with the space station at 8:12 a.m. But because of what a mission control official in Moscow described as “ratty comms” between the capsule and mission control in Moscow, possibly the result of weather conditions on Earth, Mr. Shkaplerov, the mission’s commander, was forced to abort an initial automated docking attempt. Mr. Shkaplerov instead manually steered the spacecraft to a port on the station’s Russian segment.“Up, down, left, right,” the mission control official in Moscow instructed Mr. Shkaplerov, as he steered the spacecraft closer to the station’s Russian segment. “Do what you’ve trained for. You’ll be fine.”The capsule latched onto the space station around 8:22 a.m. slightly behind schedule. Opening the hatch door was also delayed as the crew checked for air leaks, and as the Russian astronauts already on the station lined up their first shot: Ms. Peresild’s arrival.“They’re going to open the hatch from their side, and then they’re going to float towards the camera, correct? So we need to stay out of the picture,” Oleg Novitsky, one of two Russian astronauts who’ve been on the station since April, asked mission control in Moscow.Pyotr Dubrov, the other resident of the Russian segment, was behind a large digital cinema camera, recording and waiting for the MS-19 crew to open the hatch door and board the station. When it finally opened more than two hours after docking, at 11 a.m., out floated Mr. Shkaplerov and a smiling Ms. Peresild, followed by Mr. Shipenko, her director. The three then participated in a welcoming ceremony with the space station’s current crew of seven astronauts from NASA, Russia, Europe and Japan, with Ms. Sherepild in a red jumpsuit while her fellow new arrivals wore blue.A screengrab from a video by the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos showed Yulia Peresild entering the I.S.S. on Tuesday.Roscosmos, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“I still feel that it’s all just a dream and I am asleep,” she said. “It is almost impossible to believe that this all came to reality.”The two film crew members will spend nearly two weeks moviemaking on the space station before returning on Oct. 17 aboard the MS-18 Soyuz spacecraft. Mr. Novitsky will leave with the film crew, and Mr. Shkaplerov will remain on the station.“Undoubtedly, this mission is special, we have people going to space who are neither tourists nor professional cosmonauts,” said Dmitri Rogozin, director general of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. He said he hoped the flight would help the agency attract a new generation of talent.As an actress, Ms. Peresild has performed in some 70 roles onscreen, and Russian movie publications have named her among the top 10 actresses under 35 years old. She may be best known among Russian moviegoers for “Battle for Sevastopol” (2015), in which she played the role of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the deadliest Red Army female sniper during World War II.But her prominence alone wouldn’t have been enough to secure her a seat to orbit: She was picked for the flight from some 3,000 contestants in a two-stage selection procedure that involved both tests of creativity and a stringent medical and physical fitness screening.Ms. Peresild will also become the fifth Russian woman to travel to space, and the first aboard the space station since 2015, when Elena Serova returned to Earth.Aboard the space station, Ms. Peresild will star in “The Challenge.” It’s about a surgeon, played by Ms. Peresild, who embarks on an emergency mission to the orbiting lab to save the life of an ailing cosmonaut (to be performed by Mr. Novitsky). Few other details about the plot or the filming aboard the station have been announced.The crew, using hand-held cameras both on board the capsule and in the space station, started filming scenes for the movie as the spacecraft approached the outpost, Rob Navias, a NASA spokesman, said on Tuesday.For “The Challenge,” cinematic storytelling may take a back seat to the symbolism of shooting a movie in space. The production is a joint project involving Russia’s space agency Roscosmos; Channel One; and Yellow, Black and White, a Russian film studio.Anton Shkaplerov, Klim Shipenko and Ms. Peresild boarding the Soyuz before launch on Tuesday.Roscosmos, via ReutersLike a lot of private missions to space these days, Channel One and Roscosmos hope the film can prove to the public that space isn’t reserved for only government astronauts. One of the production’s core objectives is to show that “spaceflights are gradually becoming available not only for professionals, but also for an ever wider range of interested persons,” Channel One said on its website.Mr. Rogozin, the Russian space agency leader, said he hopes the mission will make “a truly serious work of art and a whole new development of the promotion of space technologies,” in order to attract young talent to Russia’s space program.Funding for Russia’s space program is beginning to wane. Starting in 2011, when the U.S. space shuttle program ended, NASA could only send astronauts to the International Space Station by paying for expensive rides on one of Russia’s Soyuz rockets. But that ended in 2020 when SpaceX’s Crew Dragon proved itself capable of sending astronauts from American soil. And recently, the United States ended purchases of a Russian rocket engine long used for NASA and Pentagon launches to space, which generated billions in revenue for Moscow.Is this really the first movie that has been made on the space station?“The Challenge” is the first full-length movie that will use scenes filmed in orbit. The movie will include about 35 to 40 minutes of scenes made on the station, Channel One says.Other kinds of productions have been made in space in the past, like “Apogee of Fear,” an eight-minute science fiction film shot by Richard Garriott, a private astronaut, in 2008. Mr. Garriott, a video game entrepreneur, paid $30 million for his seat on a Soyuz spacecraft, which he booked through Space Adventures, a space tourism broker. The company is booking future missions to the space station aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.Several feature-length documentaries have relied heavily on video shot aboard the station. “Space Station 3D,” a short 2002 documentary about the space station’s construction, was one of the earliest IMAX productions filmed in space.Are there other plans to film in orbit?Tom Cruise may have plans to film something on the space station, but it’s unclear exactly when. Deadline, a Hollywood news publication, reported in 2020 that Mr. Cruise would fly to space aboard one of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsules for an action-adventure film directed by Doug Liman. Jim Bridenstine, who served as NASA’s administrator under President Donald Trump, confirmed the plans on Twitter at the time and lauded them as a chance to galvanize the public around space exploration.Russia’s space agency announced its intention to send an actress to the space station shortly after Mr. Cruise’s plans emerged.The Nauka multipurpose laboratory module, left, docked to the International Space Station alongside a Soyuz spacecraft in July.Roscosmos, via ReutersWhat problems have the Russians had with the space station recently?Astronauts have been living aboard the space station, a science lab the size of a football field, for more than 20 years, and it’s starting to show signs of decay, particularly on the Russian side.Several air leaks on the Russian segment of the outpost have been detected in recent years, although none have posed immediate danger to the station’s crew. Astronauts found a leak in Russia’s Zvezda service module last year by using tea leaves, and patched the leak with space-grade glue and tape. Another gradual air leak is ongoing, and its source has eluded Russian space officials.And in July, Russia’s new science module, Nauka, carried out a chaotic docking procedure: Shortly after locking onto the station, the module’s thrusters began to fire erroneously, spinning the entire space station by one-and-a-half revolutions. None of the seven astronauts on board were harmed, but it was a rare “spacecraft emergency” that sent NASA and Russian officials scrambling to return the station to its normal orientation.Who else is going to the space station soon?Traffic at the space station will be busy for the next few months.On Oct. 30, NASA is scheduled to send a crew of three U.S. astronauts and one European Space Agency astronaut to the space station for a roughly six-month stay. The mission, named Crew-3, will be NASA’s fourth trek to the station using SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, a spacecraft developed with a mix of NASA and private funds.Then, more private missions. Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire, will launch to the orbital laboratory aboard a Soyuz rocket on Dec. 8 for a 12-day stay. Mr. Maezawa, an art collector and the tycoon behind the Japanese fashion retail site Zozotown, booked his first mission to space with SpaceX in 2018, aiming to one day ride the company’s Starship rocket around the moon. That won’t come until 2023, and for Mr. Maezawa’s sooner Soyuz flight, he’ll bring a producer and a camera along to document his trip.Then on Feb. 21, three private astronauts, paying $55 million each, will fly to the space station in a Crew Dragon capsule booked by the company Axiom Space. They will be joined by a fourth crew member, a retired NASA astronaut who will essentially serve as their guide.Valerie Hopkins and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting from Moscow.Sync your calendar with the solar systemNever miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that’s out of this world. More

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      in Movies

      Watch Live: Russia Launches Film Crew to Space — Time and Video Details

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      The first dog in space. The first man and woman. Now Russia is about to clinch another spaceflight first before the United States: Beating Hollywood to orbit.A Russian actress, a director and their professional Russian astronaut guide launched on a Russian rocket toward the International Space Station on Tuesday. Their mission is to shoot scenes for the first feature-length film in space. While cinematic sequences in space have long been portrayed on big screens using sound stages and advanced computer graphics, never before has a full-length movie been shot and directed in space.Here’s what you need to know:What happened during the launch and what happens next?Who is on the flight?What movie are they making on the space station?Why are they making a movie in orbit?What happened during the launch and what happens next?The Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome Tuesday, carrying a film crew to orbit.Roscosmos/Via ReutersA Soyuz rocket, the workhorse of Russia’s space program, lifted off on time at 4:55 a.m. Eastern time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The MS-19 spacecraft carrying the three-person crew is expected to dock with the space station about three hours later, at 8:12 a.m.The MS-19 crew posed for photos and waved to family and fans during launch preparations in Baikonur on Tuesday. Klim Shipenko, the director of the film, “The Challenge,” held up a script as he waved to cameras.“We didn’t forget to take it with us,” he said, according to a NASA translator, before he boarded a bus with the other crew members to get dressed in their flight suits.NASA, which manages the space station in partnership with Russia, will host another livestream for the spacecraft’s docking beginning at 7:30 a.m. You can also watch the video in the player embedded above.The three-hour trip, called a “two-orbit scheme,” is unusually fast for journeys to the space station, which typically last between eight to 22 hours over multiple orbits around Earth. The first three-hour trip was performed by a Soyuz spacecraft in 2020 for Russia’s MS-17 mission, carrying two Russian astronauts and a U.S. astronaut.Who is on the flight?Yulia Peresild, a Russian actress, during a training session at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan last month.Andrey Shelepin/GCTC/Roscosmos, via ReutersYulia Peresild, a Russian actress, Mr. Shipenko and Anton Shkaplerov, a veteran astronaut who has completed three treks to and from the space station since 2011, are strapped inside the MS-19 capsule on their way to the space station. Ms. Peresild has spent months training for the mission.The film crew will return to Earth on Oct. 17 along with Oleg Novitsky, an astronaut who’s been on the station since April.“Undoubtedly, this mission is special, we have people going to space who are neither tourists nor professional cosmonauts,” said Dmitri Rogozin, director general of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. He said he hoped the flight would help the agency attract a new generation of talent.As an actress, Ms. Peresild, has performed in some 70 roles onscreen, and Russian movie publications have named her among the top 10 actresses under 35 years old. She may be best known among Russian moviegoers for “Battle for Sevastopol” (2015), in which she played the role of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the deadliest Red Army female sniper during World War II.But her prominence alone wouldn’t have been enough to secure her a seat to orbit: She was picked for the flight from some 3,000 contestants in a two-stage selection procedure that involved both tests of creativity and a stringent medical and physical fitness screening.What movie are they making on the space station?The movie’s working title is “The Challenge,” and it’s about a surgeon, played by Ms. Peresild, who embarks on an emergency mission to the space station to save an ailing cosmonaut’s life. Few other details about the plot or the filming aboard the station have been announced, although NASA said on Tuesday that Mr. Novitsky, one of the Russian astronauts currently aboard the station, will play the role of the sick cosmonaut.The crew, using hand-held cameras both on board the capsule and in the space station, started filming scenes for the movie as the spacecraft approached the outpost, Rob Navias, a NASA spokesman, said on the livestream.Why are they making a movie in orbit?For “The Challenge,” cinematic storytelling may take a back seat to the symbolism of shooting a movie in space. The production is a joint project involving Russia’s space agency Roscosmos; Channel One; and Yellow, Black and White, a Russian film studio.Like a lot of private missions to space these days, Channel One and Roscosmos hope the film can prove to the public that space isn’t reserved for only government astronauts. One of the production’s core objectives is to show that “spaceflights are gradually becoming available not only for professionals, but also for an ever wider range of interested persons,” Channel One said on its website.Mr. Rogozin , the Russian space agency leader, said he hopes the mission will make “a truly serious work of art and a whole new development of the promotion of space technologies,” in order to attract young talent to Russia’s space program.Funding for Russia’s space program is beginning to wane. Starting in 2011, when the U.S. space shuttle program ended, NASA could only send astronauts to the International Space Station by paying for expensive rides on one of Russia’s Soyuz rockets. But that ended in 2020 when SpaceX’s Crew Dragon proved itself capable of sending astronauts from American soil. And recently, the United States ended purchases of a Russian rocket engine long used for NASA and Pentagon launches to space, which generated billions in revenue for Moscow.The Nauka multipurpose laboratory module, left, docked to the International Space Station alongside a Soyuz spacecraft in July.Roscosmos, via ReutersIs this really the first movie that has been made on the space station?“The Challenge” is the first full-length movie that will use scenes filmed in orbit. The movie will include about 35 to 40 minutes of scenes made on the station, Channel One says.Other kinds of productions have been made in space in the past, like “Apogee of Fear,” an eight-minute science fiction film shot by Richard Garriott, a private astronaut, in 2008. Mr. Garriott, a video game entrepreneur, paid $30 million for his seat on a Soyuz spacecraft, which he booked through Space Adventures, a space tourism broker. The company is booking future missions to the space station aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.Several feature-length documentaries have relied heavily on video shot aboard the station. “Space Station 3D,” a short 2002 documentary about the space station’s construction, was the first IMAX production filmed in space.Are there other plans to film in orbit?Tom Cruise may have plans to film something on the space station, but it’s unclear exactly when. Deadline, a Hollywood news publication, reported in 2020 that Mr. Cruise would fly to space aboard one of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsules for an action-adventure film directed by Doug Liman. Jim Bridenstine, who served as NASA’s administrator under President Donald Trump, confirmed the plans on Twitter at the time and lauded them as a chance to galvanize the public around space exploration.Russia’s space agency announced its intention to send an actress to the space station shortly after Mr. Cruise’s plans emerged.What problems have the Russians had with the space station recently?Astronauts have been living aboard the space station, a science lab the size of a football field, for more than 20 years, and it’s starting to show signs of decay, particularly on the Russian side.Several air leaks on the Russian segment of the outpost have been detected in recent years, although none have posed immediate danger to the station’s crew. Astronauts found a leak in Russia’s Zvezda service module last year by using tea leaves, and patched the leak with space-grade glue and tape. Another gradual air leak is ongoing, and its source has eluded Russian space officials.And in July, Russia’s new science module, Nauka, carried out a chaotic docking procedure: Shortly after locking onto the station, the module’s thrusters began to fire erroneously, spinning the entire space station by one-and-a-half revolutions. None of the seven astronauts on board were harmed, but it was a rare “spacecraft emergency” that sent NASA and Russian officials scrambling to return the station to its normal orientation.Valerie Hopkins and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting from Moscow.Sync your calendar with the solar systemNever miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that’s out of this world. More

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      ‘The Village Detective: A Song Cycle’ Review: Soviet Film Hero Emerges

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      Bill Morrison, the poet laureate of lost films, turns the story of footage found near Iceland into a history of a slice of Soviet cinema.The main title of this movie could be referring to two different people. The first would be Fyodor Ivanovich Aniskin, the avuncular hero of a banal 1969 Soviet film, played by the frequently avuncular actor Mikhail Zharov. Consulting on a case in which a musician, new to his hamlet, complains of a purloined accordion, Aniskin notes that the man does not yet understand the values of their small town.The other “village detective” might be Bill Morrison himself. For Morrison, who is the producer, director and editor of this strangely intoxicating film, is a cinematic investigator of the first stripe. The values of his own corner of film revival place as much emphasis on ruin as on restoration. His astonishing 2017 feature, “Dawson City: Frozen Time,” unearthed an uncanny swatch of buried film history from the end of the line of the Klondike Gold Rush. Other films, like “Decasia” (2002), are audiovisual tone poems reveling in the beautiful rot of old reels in varying states of disrepair.Like “Frozen Time,” “The Village Detective” tells the story of a find. After a preface in which two films featuring Zharov, one from the 1930s and another from the early 1970s, conduct a kind of dialogue with each other, Morrison tells, in onscreen titles, of a 2016 email from a friend, the Icelandic musician and composer Johann Johannsson.On a trip home, Johannsson heard of an Icelandic lobster trawler catching a forgotten film canister in its net. We learn that the canister was picked up on the border of the tectonic plates that hold North America and Europe — the West abutting the East, so to speak. Underneath these plates is molten lava; the hydrogen sulfide emanating from that lava is a very high-quality preservative. Film preservationists in Iceland were practically salivating over the possibilities.What was found, and what we see, in mesmeric images transferred from celluloid that was steeped in mud, was the Soviet movie from 1969, “Derevensky Detektiv,” savaged by critics but a huge popular hit — so much so that Zharov continued to play Aniskin in sequels for the last decade of his career. He died in 1981 at the age of 82.As Morrison demonstrates through exhaustively selected clips, the actor’s story is also a, if not the, story of Soviet cinema. His film debut, as an extra, was in 1915, in a pre-Soviet film about Ivan the Terrible. He appeared in movies by important Soviet directors such as Boris Barnet and V.I. Pudovkin — and by many less important filmmakers. As he grew a bit stout in his thirties, he began to resemble the players of friendly-but-hapless supporting roles in American studio films. He’s got a touch of Alan Hale Sr., you could say.He did some of his best work in Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible, Part II,” which got its director in hot water with Stalin. And when Zharov’s in-laws were imprisoned as part of the so-called “doctors’ plot” to assassinate Stalin (no such plot existed; the whole affair was an antisemitic fraud), Zharov was ostracized for not denouncing them.Morrison weaves this history into a treatment of Zharov’s 1969 star turn that renders its stodgy corniness poetic. (The accordion-centered score, by David Lang, is essential to this near-alchemical process.) The movie ends on a droll semi-cosmic joke that one expects its dedicatee, Johannsson, who died in 2018, might have appreciated.The Village Detective: A Song CycleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In English, with some Russian and Icelandic, subtitled. In theaters. More

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      A Pianist Finds Inspiration to Write Again

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      Evgeny Kissin, who has made a career of performing, was surprised to find himself drawn once more to composing.For the pianist Evgeny Kissin, it was a love story that provided the inspiration to write his own music again. After being reunited with a childhood friend — now his wife — he woke up in the middle of the night and jotted down a “Meditation” that would become the first of his Four Piano Pieces Op. 1.Mr. Kissin is best known as a soloist who began his career as a child prodigy. By age 12 he had performed both Chopin concertos in his native Russia and by 19 he had made headlines with the Berlin Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic.He remains one of today’s most highly regarded pianists for the intensity and sensitivity of his interpretations. He also began writing music as a child, as soon as he had learned notation, but stopped at about age 14, not resuming until just shy of a decade ago.As he approaches his 50th birthday in October, Mr. Kissin maintains an insatiable intellectual curiosity. His solo recital Saturday at the Salzburg Festival features works by Chopin, Gershwin, Alban Berg and Tichon N. Chrennikow (as a child, Mr. Kissin performed works, including ones he had written himself, for this Russian composer).The fall brings a busy concert schedule, in cities as varied as Jerusalem, Seoul and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. At the same time, he is steadily growing his catalog, most recently with “Thanatopsis,” a setting of the William Cullen Bryant poem, for female voice and piano.“The very fact that I started composing again came to me as a surprise,” he admitted in a video call earlier this month from his home in Prague, citing a “hidden potential” that was awakened by his romance with that childhood friend, Karina Arzumanova, whom he married in 2017.In his 2017 autobiography “Memoirs and Reflections,” Mr. Kissin wrote that music “stopped sounding in my head” as his concert career gained momentum. Since 2012, ideas have been flowing back, and he continues in a noncompetitive manner: “Let us see what comes of it,” he wrote, “and how audiences will respond to my music.”Mr. Kissin’s music displays a range of extreme emotions.Milan Bures for The New York TimesThe works that have been published so far reveal the sharp intellect and natural artistry that also characterize his performances. The last of the Four Piano Pieces, the Toccata, revolves around a jazzy, Gershwin-like motif, at first distorted by harsh dissonance, while running across the keyboard with virtuosic arpeggiated textures.His one-movement cello sonata, meanwhile, is lyrical and introspective, with a theme that sounds as if it is based on a 12-tone system but in fact is derived from only eight notes.Mr. Kissin has received the support of Arvo Part, one of the most widely performed contemporary composers, and leading musicians. His String Quartet was recorded by the Kopelman Quartet in 2016, and the cello piece has been championed by the international soloists Steven Isserlis, David Geringas and Renaud Capuçon.In a phone interview from London, Mr. Isserlis noted the range of styles that Mr. Kissin has managed to express in only a handful of works. “He’s such an intense person, and musician,” he said. “He has a very serious view of the world, although he’s not without humor.”Mr. Isserlis placed the “extreme emotions” of Mr. Kissin’s music in a line of pianist-composers ranging from Schuman to Rachmaninoff but also noted a specifically Russian-Jewish tradition. “There’s a darkness,” he said. “But there’s also a love of beauty. It has its roots in the past, like all good music.”Mr. Kissin, who in 2013 became an Israeli citizen, qualified any strict categorization by saying that he identifies with “a small minority of the Russian population, namely, the liberal Russian intelligentsia — a significant part of which consists of Jews like me.”For many years he has recited Yiddish poetry onstage and is himself a poet and writer, with work published in the Yiddish edition of The Forward and in a 2019 book, “A Yiddisher Sheygets.”Mr. Kissin at his home in Prague.Milan Bures for The New York TimesThe pianist is passionate about raising awareness toward the historic and aesthetic value of Yiddish, a Germanic language spoken by Ashkenazi Jews since the ninth century.Yiddish, Mr. Kissin writes in his memoir, belongs “to the highest achievements of world culture.” He notes its “rich and expressive” quality and an “inner strength” that “is capable of conveying the subtlest thoughts and feelings.”He and the writer and editor Boris Sandler joined forces for the Yiddish-language musical “The Bird Alef From the Old Gramophone,” which was performed two years ago in Birobidzhan, the center of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Eastern Russia. Although Jews account for less than 2 percent of the region’s population, Yiddish is still the official language.The musical’s creators hope to have it staged in Moscow next summer to mark the 70th anniversary of the Night of the Murdered Poets, when 13 Jewish intellectuals — including Yiddish poets — were executed by firing squads under orders from Stalin.Mr. Kissin is also working on a vocal cycle for baritone and piano based on the work of the Russian poet Alexander Blok. Ideas for the work emerged as early as 1986, he said, but he began writing down the music only in recent years.Mr. Kissin again emphasized that “it’s a matter of inspiration. And of course also of time. I only compose sporadically because it requires blocks of concentration,” he said, “which my main occupation as concert pianist allows very seldom.”Asked what repertoire he would like to explore in coming years, he rattled off a list of solo and chamber work with encyclopedic precision: the solo works of Bach and Shostakovich, which he has never played in public; Brahms’s Third Violin Sonata, one of his “favorite pieces of music ever written,” which he has played only once; Haydn, Mozart, Ravel, Scriabin.But he will also return to Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, which he has not played since 1996, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth in 2023. Also that year, he plans to take on the Piano Concerto of Rimsky-Korsakov.Despite his renewed activities as a composer, Mr. Kissin remains humble: “I would never dare to compose myself knowing that I would never be able to write something approaching the level of the great music already written.“Playing music,” he continued, “is how I can express myself best.” More