Daring to challenge the official story at Hot Docs
What-if thriller speculates about the long-rumoured faking of the moon landing
In one of the most historic photos of the 20th Century, an American astronaut walks on the moon during the Apollo 11 lunar mission.
But wait — who’s the guy in the dark suit in the foreground?
It’s Toronto filmmaker and actor Matt Johnson ( The Dirties), who combines fact, fiction and the most wild-eyed of speculation for Operation Avalanche, a genre-defying work coming to the 2016 edition of Hot Docs, which runs April 28 — May 8. (The Sundance hit has its Canadian premiere April 29, prior to a theatri- cal run later this year.)
Set in the late 1960s during the Cold War/space race between the U.S. and Russia, Operation Avalanche is built like a documentary within a documentary, but it plays like a vintage spy thriller or 1970s paranoia classic like The Parallax View.
It asks the most Earth-shaking of questions: What if Apollo 11 was a hoax, cooked up by a desperate NASA, a sneaky CIA and a complicit Stanley Kubrick, who made a moon landing look real in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Many other films at Hot Docs will similarly challenge and/or enlarge the official story behind famous events and people.
Other anticipated fest highlights include Ezra Edelman’s O.J. Simpson: Made In America, which digs for the truth behind the “Trial of the Century”; Brendan Byrne’s Bobby Sands: 66 Days, which uses the diary of the 1980s Irish hunger striker for a unique first-person perspective; John Walker’s Quebec My Country Mon Pays, a post-Quiet Revolution study on under-reported social tumult in Quebec; and Pierre Bismuth’s Where is Rocky II?, the bizarro hunt for an artistically placed fake rock reportedly hidden among real ones in the California desert. Details on these and many other films are available at hotdocs.ca.
What if the Apollo 11 moon landing was a hoax, cooked up by a desperate NASA, a sneaky CIA and a complicit Stanley Kubrick?