The Farthest (Emer Reynolds, 2017)
One of the biggest movie buzzes of the year, this ground breaking Irish production takes us “12 billion miles and counting” into space. Reynolds’s captivating doc details NASA’s ambitious 1977 Voyager program, which launched probes that were to become the first human-made objects to enter interstellar space. The probe famously carried the ‘golden record’, containing information about our planet for any civilisation it might come across, and, of course, took the famous photograph that shows the Earth as Carl Sagan’s ‘pale blue dot’. NASA did this with less computing power than an average smartphone. If you’re wondering on the feminist credentials of the film, it’s exemplary of the power and importance of women behind the camera. We celebrate self proclaimed “science geek” Emer Reynolds and superb cinematographer Kate McCullough for this incredible and accomplished work, which quite rightly won Best Irish Documentary and the Audience Award at the Dublin International Film Festival.
The film will be preceded by short film Stacey Lee by Jennifer Meade.