Throughout July and August BFI Southbank will present a summer of science fiction with KOSMOS: A Soviet Space Odyssey, the second instalment of the BFI’s classic, cult and contemporary Russian and Soviet cinema season: KINO. Experts from the BFI have unearthed fantastic treasures from film archives in Russia for KOSMOS – a stunning showcase of UK premieres and films that have never been seen outside the Soviet Union – until now. KOSMOS will reveal how the roots of modern science-fiction in cinema are in Russian film, and illustrate how influential the fantastic titles screening were on the genre, across the western world, with films from as early as 1924 until 2008. The season also offers key documentaries in a programme that explores the cultural impact of the Soviet space dream on the cinema from the 1950s and 60s, through the more dystopian 1970s and 80s and on to the present day.

Alongside screenings of the more familiar classic Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), there will be surprising events such as Red Space (when Sergei Krikalev, the Head of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre will join in a day inspired by Russian cosmonauts), and a season introduction by Sergei Kapterev (from the Institute of Cinema Art in Moscow). For younger audiences there will be Rocket School, a week of lunar themed fun and film for kids, 26–29 July. This futuristic vision will screen in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s momentous journey into space and the nationwide celebrations of the occasion, and his visit to London - including the unveiling of a statue on the Mall, commissioned by the British Council.

Gagarin’s orbit in space, on 12 April 1961, was revered around the world as one of mankind’s greatest achievements. Some of the most fascinating footage of his launch and the ensuing celebrations, such as Peleshian’s Our Century (1982), will feature alongside innovative visions of man’s voyage to outer space in 1950s films, created by Russian visual- effects pioneers, notably Pavel Klushantsev (whose special effects would influence Stanley Kubrick and a generation of Hollywood filmmakers) with Road to the Stars (1952) and the kitsch Planet of Storms (1962).

2011 also marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris, and would have marked the great writer's 90th birthday. KOSMOS presents a selection of rarely seen Eastern Bloc adaptations of Lem's trail-blazing fiction, including Kurt Maetzig’s classic The Silent Star (1959), drawn from his novel The Astronauts and following an international expedition to Venus, set in 1985; Icarus XB1 (1963), directed by Jindrich Polák and based on The Magellan Cloud, with cosmonauts who dress in black-tie for cocktail parties, while searching for life on distant planets; and The Interrogation of Pilot Pirx (1979), a Polish-Soviet co-production based on Lem's The Inquest. London-based partners also celebrating Stanislaw Lem this year include The National Theatre, the British Library and the Polish Cultural Institute.

The rocket-fuelled science-fiction genre was partly modelled on recent US productions, but influenced by Russian cultural traditions, mores and expectations. Fantastical images of the future were based on the tradition of lavish set design, previously established by the blockbuster Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924) and Cosmic Voyage (1936), which sees Josef Stalin on a voyage to the moon. Contributions from some of the original artists who worked on such classics, such as Ernst Kunstmann, veteran of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, would go on to inspire new generations of Soviet filmmakers; whilst titles that made it to ‘the West’ found their way on to the B-movie circuit in the 1960s – albeit mauled beyond recognition when enterprising US producers bought them cheaply at the height of the Cold War. Under Roger Corman’s guidance, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and Curtis Harrington cut their teeth refashioning communist science fiction to suit Western sensibilities.

The Soviet era’s optimistic golden age ended with the loss of the Space Race to the US at the end of the 60s. The onset of a deep, systemic economic crisis to the Russian space project found a new interpretation in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), probably the best known titles in the West from this period. Stalker raised the stakes by bringing science fiction down to Earth, portraying a poisoned post-industrial world that is stranger and more treacherous than the distant planets of the cosmos.

By the fall of the Soviet Union the histories and iconographies of the communist era could be openly interrogated. KOSMOS will present three key recent films – First on the Moon (2005), Dreaming of Space (2005) and Paper Soldier (2008) – which together can be seen as part of a revisionist process to re-evaluate the place of Russia’s legendary space programme in the cultural memory, without nostalgia for the repressive regime that sponsored it.

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