CITIZENS OF THE COSMOS is based on the manifesto of Biocosmism, written by Alexander Svyatogor in 1922. Shot on locations in Tokyo and Kyiv, in collaboration with a group of amateur actors, volunteers, and extras, the film presents an imagined community voicing the historical desires of Russian Cosmism – immortality, resurrection of the dead, and interplanetarism – all set in everyday life in contemporary Japan. Using urban shrines, cemeteries, a crematorium, tatami rooms, a bamboo forest, an industrial gas plant, and city streets as an open air stage, the film gradually narrates the text of the biocosmist manifesto while presenting a sequence of dream-like tableaus, featuring rejuvenation through blood transfusion, funerary processions and demonstrations, the Danse Macabre, the cremation bone picking ceremony (骨上げ), attempts to communicate with the dead using stethoscopes, and a theremin orchestra recital, among other scenes. Set to an original music score composed by Alva Noto, CITIZENS OF THE COSMOS is an experiment in defamiliarization: a speculative test of the universality implicit in Cosmism’s premise when projected outside of the sphere of Russian language, geography, tradition, and culture.
