Heart of an Astronaut

What is it like to be an astronaut? The experience is typically described as having a significant impact on all those who undertake it – people’s perceptions of life have been altered by what some refer to as ‘the overview effect.’ In Jennifer Rainsford’s captivating documentary Heart of an Astronaut, the film’s subject might be much more firmly rooted in the nature of the bodily experience but it still, through an intimate and physical exploration, touches on or intimates similarly intangible ideas. The film does this by basing its enquiries on the attentive perspective of the physician to the astronauts at the European Space Agency, Dr. Brigitte Godard.

Although the film may begin with blurry images of celestial bodies being brought into focus as Godard recounts her childhood desire to be an astronaut, the film otherwise takes as its primary focus the very human bodies of those preparing to visit, and currently in situ aboard, the International Space Station. The footage moves freely between Earth and orbit, as crew members discuss the physical conditions in zero gravity and Godard provides the medical background to the changes that their bodies are undergoing as part of the process.

One of the film’s most effective sequences follows an astronaut on a spacewalk. This trope that feels so familiar from narrative fiction is given a whole new level of tension in a scene in which an astronaut speaks about their anxiety prior to a walk – recalling a dream that saw them cut adrift and floating helplessly into the abyss. Godard herself describes how the heart rate spikes and you can hear a waver in their voice prior to leaving the safety of the space station for the first time; “not only because they are stressed but because of the emotion.” On the walk itself, the apparent banality of moving around the station’s surface and clipping or untangling a safety tether becomes as dramatic as anything in Gravity. Godard proposes that the joy that the astronauts feel at achieving such an ambition – of being in space after so long wanting, and training, for it – will set them right in the end. Godard’s role might be to monitor their heart as a precaution, but it is also their heart that guides them through.

Director: Jennifer Rainsford
Cinematography: Karolina Pajak
Producer: Constanza Julia Bani
Editing: Jeroen Pool
Music: Collen, Geometria del universo
Production companies: Fasad Production AB (Sweden)
Venue: Visions du Réel (International Medium Length & Short Film Competition)
In English, French, German
14 minutes