Shokouk: A Cosmicomedy in Four Acts

Shokouk: A Cosmicomedy in Four Acts is a transhistorical hybrid documentary that traces a polyphony of characters, sites, and encounters related to infrastructures of space travel and cosmic imaginaries. Following a vertiginous narrative connecting various cosmic machinations from the 12th century Persianate world to the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome in the present moment, the film weaves historical facts and archival fabulations to question our common perceptions of time and space.

A crowd gathers to watch a mock televised rocket launch, staged to resemble the Cosmodrome in the aftermath of its closure to foreigners following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The spectators perform a “gossip score” developed by Ulyana Toporovskaya and Lera Kim based on field research in the Ulytau Region, Kazakhstan—a region lying within the flight path and “fall zones” of international launches. As the rockets ascend, at times exploding in mid-air, they release large volumes of highly toxic heptyl fuel that blankets several hundred thousand square kilometers. The vastness of territories affected, multiplied by the protracted temporality of decades of launches, shifts the scales of violence from the original launch event into a delayed destruction dispersed across time and space—a slow corporeal and environmental violence.

Tracing the spectral waves, we arrive at the Kazakh city of Baikonur during the genesis of Russian/Soviet colonial cosmic imaginaries. We meet the archival fiction of Ukrainian researcher Valery Pimenov, who in 1978 created the character of Nikifor Nikitin, a Russian tradesman who in 1848 is serving a sentence of hard labor in the Kazakh copper mines for the crime of making seditious speeches against the Tsar. According to Pimenov’s fabricated fragment from the Moscow Provincial Gazette of the same year, Nikitin had attempted to incite the public to evade the Tsar’s rule by fleeing to the moon—thus making him the first cosmonaut.

Nikitin then ejects us to the present, where a karaoke event celebrating the inauguration of a fictional Chinese infrastructure company “Skybridge Unlimited” is held in Uzbekistan. Filmed on a Chinese-owned sand mine bordering a central Asian branch of China’s Belt and Road railroad, the karaoke takes the shape of a duet between the 12th and 13th century astronomers and polymaths, Omar Khayam and Nasirdin Al-Tusi. Their dialogue takes the form of speculation on the variable luminosity of Polaris and its correlation with tellurian politics during the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula and the alleged demise of the Islamic Golden Age.

The spatio-temporal scale shifts once again and we arrive in geostationary orbit aboard an abandoned MIR Space Station. The camera floats in zero gravity towards a 10th century Arabic astrolabe as audio excerpts derived from Andrei Ujică’s 1997 movie.