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I was looking at the film review pages in The Guardian last week and was surprised to see the title of one of the films was Aniara. That name meant something to me.
There is an epic poem called Aniara written by the Swede Harry Martinson in 1956, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I remember seeing an English translation of this in the seventies, but I never read it. I mostly know of the poem through the 1959 operatic version by Karl-Birger Blomdahl. I've never seen a staging of this, but there was a recording released in the eighties which I have on CD.
Reading the review, I realised that the film in question was indeed a version of the Martinson poem. A quick google revealed that it was showing at only one cinema in the south-east of England that I could see, the Rio in Dalston in north London, one showing a night this week. I went to see it yesterday. It's only a small cinema, and the showing was full.
It seems to be a fairly faithful version of the poem from what little I know of it, and from the libretto of the opera, although I think at least one character has changed gender from the original.
Aniara is a spaceship. Environmental disasters on Earth have led to large-scale colonisation of Mars and Aniara is taking a consignment of passengers there. But shortly after setting off the ship collides with space junk, is knocked off course, and has to jettison its fuel. There is no way to turn the ship.
The main character is Mimaroben, or MR (Emelie Jonsson), the technician who operates Mima, a sort of virtual reality room that shows people scenes of an unspoilt Earth. This seems to be some sort of artificial intelligence, possibly organic. After the collision, Mima becomes very popular, so popular that Mima becomes overused and destructs.
The voyage continues. MR and her girlfriend Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro) join a fertility cult - plenty of nudity and sex - and Isagel becomes pregnant, but also depressed. It all gets very bleak. I cannot imagine Hollywood doing a remake of this.
Visually it's very good. Aniara is obviously based on a cruise ship. I've never been on a cruise but last month I spent several hours on ferries going to and from Dublin and a couple of years ago even more time on ferries going to and from Helsinki. There was much I could recognise. Aniara has bars, restaurants, games rooms, even a large swimming pool. Even the crew uniforms look like cruise ship uniforms.
Some of the science is a bit gobbledegook, but some of this could be the translations of the subtitles. However, no matter how many million years you travel, you can't go to the constellation of Lyra.
Incidentally, I see Aniara the poem is out of print in the UK. There was a translation made in 1999, but the one copy on Amazon has an asking price of £167.
There is an epic poem called Aniara written by the Swede Harry Martinson in 1956, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I remember seeing an English translation of this in the seventies, but I never read it. I mostly know of the poem through the 1959 operatic version by Karl-Birger Blomdahl. I've never seen a staging of this, but there was a recording released in the eighties which I have on CD.
Reading the review, I realised that the film in question was indeed a version of the Martinson poem. A quick google revealed that it was showing at only one cinema in the south-east of England that I could see, the Rio in Dalston in north London, one showing a night this week. I went to see it yesterday. It's only a small cinema, and the showing was full.
It seems to be a fairly faithful version of the poem from what little I know of it, and from the libretto of the opera, although I think at least one character has changed gender from the original.
Aniara is a spaceship. Environmental disasters on Earth have led to large-scale colonisation of Mars and Aniara is taking a consignment of passengers there. But shortly after setting off the ship collides with space junk, is knocked off course, and has to jettison its fuel. There is no way to turn the ship.
The main character is Mimaroben, or MR (Emelie Jonsson), the technician who operates Mima, a sort of virtual reality room that shows people scenes of an unspoilt Earth. This seems to be some sort of artificial intelligence, possibly organic. After the collision, Mima becomes very popular, so popular that Mima becomes overused and destructs.
The voyage continues. MR and her girlfriend Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro) join a fertility cult - plenty of nudity and sex - and Isagel becomes pregnant, but also depressed. It all gets very bleak. I cannot imagine Hollywood doing a remake of this.
Visually it's very good. Aniara is obviously based on a cruise ship. I've never been on a cruise but last month I spent several hours on ferries going to and from Dublin and a couple of years ago even more time on ferries going to and from Helsinki. There was much I could recognise. Aniara has bars, restaurants, games rooms, even a large swimming pool. Even the crew uniforms look like cruise ship uniforms.
Some of the science is a bit gobbledegook, but some of this could be the translations of the subtitles. However, no matter how many million years you travel, you can't go to the constellation of Lyra.
Incidentally, I see Aniara the poem is out of print in the UK. There was a translation made in 1999, but the one copy on Amazon has an asking price of £167.
