To the Stars by Hard Ways

"To the Stars by Hard Ways" (1981) — one of Soviet cinema's most ambitious sci-fi pictures — is available to watch online on iFILM. Directed by Richard Viktorov, the film opens in the 23rd century, when the patrol spacecraft Pushkin stumbles on a drifting derelict and pulls out the sole survivor: Niya, an artificial humanoid from a destroyed cloning lab. She looks human. She isn't.

Back on Earth, a family of scientists takes Niya in and tries to untangle what she is and why she was built. Elena Metyolkina plays her with an unsettling blankness — no affect, no spontaneous gesture, every movement a fraction too deliberate. Then the other shoe drops: a control module is wired into her brain, dormant until the moment Niya sets foot on Dessa, her dying home planet. Vadim Ledogorov joins the expedition that carries her there — and into the middle of a planetary ruin.

Viktorov isn't really interested in the spaceship hardware. The question underneath everything — what separates a manufactured being from a conscious one, and who gets to decide — gives the film a weight that has outlasted the Cold War era that produced it. Stream "To the Stars by Hard Ways" (1981) online on iFILM.