Session introduced by director Juan Francisco Salazar.

COSMOGRAPHIES (Dir: Juan Francisco Salazar; Australia, Chile | 93 mins) VICTORIAN PREMIERE

The struggle for environmental justice against ongoing forms of extractivism and ecological ruin in the Atacama Desert is an allegory against ongoing plans to colonize the Moon and Mars. Prof. Salazar’s extraordinary hybrid film draws from modes of speculative fiction, observational and poetic documentary, activism, and Indigi-queer approaches. Māori astrobiologist Xuê Noon (played by Australian/Māori artist Victoria Hunt) finds solace in Mars in 2051 as a leader from the Aotearoa Space Agency on an international scientific mission, following the discovery of dormant microorganisms by the NASA Mars Sample Return Mission in 2039. Xuê wanders across this sentient planet and reflects on the newly found lifeforms as she grows plants in a glasshouse. Through the spirit of an ancient taniwha, she slipstreams in spacetime to the Atacama Desert and, eventually, to Aotearoa.