Screening

<em>Welcome Interplanetary and Sidereal Space Conquerors</em>: Film screening & conversation with filmmaker

Thu, Mar 27, 2025

6:30 PM–9:00 PM

Room 9207 at CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC. Free and open to all. Registration required.

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Join us for the film screening of this one-of-a-kind experimental documentary film Welcome Interplanetary and Sidereal Space Conquerors (2024, written and directed by Andrés Jurado) that takes us on a journey through a little known episode of the Latin American Cold War via archival 16mm documentary film footage. The screening will be followed by a conversation (via zoom), with filmmaker Andrés Jurado, moderated by LAILAC Professor and CPCP Fellow Ángeles Donoso Macaya. Film in English and Spanish; with English subtitles. 

More About the Film:

In the 1960s, as part of the moon trip training, US astronauts were abandoned in the Darien rain forests. In this survival exercise, they meet a native, exchanges some objects, suddenly a terror invades their bodies. Did they think they were going to be decapitated, or eaten by a wild cannibal? Welcome Interplanetary and Sidereal Space Conquerors intervene and deconstructs archive images and propaganda films of the Aerospace Race to tell, from the perspective of the so-called Third World, the story of man’s desire to conquer space revealing his obsession to make it a colony while imagining it as an exotic paradise, full of beasts, and inhuman ghosts. 

Confront and explore the astronaut-indigenous duality that haunted the jungle during the Cold War, rediscover the update of the colonial myths of conquest that covered up the invasion of the New World in search of gold and resources, until showing the image of delirious madness that will make the empire no longer a paper tiger but a wounded tiger about to explode.

From La Vulcanizadora, the film’s producer: “In the theatre of the Cold War, astronauts lost in the Darien are besieged by their deepest fears when surprised by an Indigenous person, a deconstruction of film and propaganda archives from tropical survival training challenges the colonial narrative inscribed in the conquest of space.”

Images from Welcome Interplanetary and Sidereal Space Conquerors / Bienvenidos Conquistadores Interplanetarios y del Espacio Sideral

Festivals (selection):

Moderator

This event co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Ph.D. Program in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the CUNY Graduate Center.

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