Stars in the night sky are increasingly obscured by the light pollution of orbiting satellites, and future generations of humans will have no memory of ever having seen them. This is not an eerie imagining of science-fiction, but a real-world concern explored in the disquieting documentary Shifting Baselines, which had its world premiere in the International Feature Film Competition at Visions du Réel in Nyon.
Unfolding in a luminous, almost alien black-and-white, it takes stock of what is fast becoming the new normal in the small coastal settlement of Boca Chica, Texas. There, tech billionaire Elon Musk’s venture SpaceX operates its Starbase rocket launch facility, where a prototype is being tested for the thousands of ships he plans to manufacture to create a colony on Mars. Montreal-based director Julien Elie, whose previous features Dark Sun (2018) and The White Guard (2023) dealt with the human and environmental cost of cartel crime in Mexico, offers up a vision of an America in which the ‘60s obsession with outer space, with its race to land a man on the Moon, has returned, amid fears of a ruined planet and the new dream of escape to somewhere else that is habitable. But chunks of space debris from missions, like floating shrapnel, is only adding to environmental degradation, and extending the sphere of destruction of a species no closer to taking better care of its first home.
The perspectives of various individuals who are impacted by this new space age are intelligently woven together, starting with the enthusiasts who set up their deck chairs to gawk at launches. Former NASA employee Doug has spent over a year on a motorbike tour, sleeping under the heavens. Meanwhile, astrophysicists and researchers like Samantha track asteroids, her field of vision in rural Saskatchewan’s dark sky disrupted by Starlink’s satellites. Biologists tag rare birds in Boca Chica’s surrounding wetlands reserve, which is under the official protection of a government that has also, incompatibly, supported SpaceX. Off the coast, fishermen cast around for ever-smaller fish. According to the phenomenon of “shifting baselines,” original resource abundance is forgotten over generations, and norms for catch size gradually change, so that tolerance for over-fishing and environmental decimation grows without our noticing — just as stars are fading from visual recollection.
Boca Chica was a sleepy backwater that had never been much in the sights of real estate developers, and now the township has been all but taken over by SpaceX, with hundreds of its employees housed close to the facility so they can be in easy call range to meet the punishing demands of the workplace culture. This is a tech company, we get the impression, that peddles an ideology of heroic voyagers on high-end adventures, but has little regard for those who will not be welcomed onto its elite trips — the undocumented immigrants who try to evade Border Patrol in Boca Chica as they cross from Mexico, or members of the indigenous Carrizo-Comecrudo nation, whose sacred land borders the SpaceX location.
The film’s moody undertow of anxiety over resource scarcity and the loss of ancient patterns of signs is shored up by Mimi Allard’s sparse, brooding soundscape. Meticulous cinematography by Glauco Bermudez and Francois Messier-Rheault captures both the stark beauty of the natural landscape and the haunting incongruity of human-made interventions of industry. The allure of space is readily apparent in the inky, mysterious frames of Shifting Baselines, but there is no glorification of humanity’s heedlessly destructive, expansionist behaviour. Instead, it leaves us to mull the prospect of the Kessler scenario predicted by scientists, whereby a chain reaction from a space junk collision could wipe out planetary orbital regions from use — a lesser-known peril flagged up by this elegantly realised doc in urgent step with our existentially anxious times.
Director: Julien Elie
Editing: Xi Feng
Producers: Andreas Mendritzki, Aonan Yang, Julien Elie
Cinematography: Glauco Bermudez, Francois Messier-Rheault
Sound: Daniel Capeille, Sylvain Bellemare, Bernard Gariépy Strobl
Music: Mimi Allard
Production companies: GreenGround Productions (Canada), Cinema Belmopan (Canada)
Sales: Filmotor
Venue: Visions du Réel (International Feature Film Competition)
In English, French, Spanish
100 minutes
