Sundance Film Festival audiences are traveling from the snowy streets of Park City, Utah, this week to the powdery lunar surface by way of David Sington's In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary about astronauts in NASA's Apollo space program.
The movie, already generating buzz as a favorite among festival goers, isn't the first film to document the mission of the only men ever to have set foot on another world. What makes it different is that the story is told in the words of the surviving astronauts--at least one from every Apollo mission--who offer a very human glimpse at what their journey felt like, and what it means to them now.
The film's producers spent weeks in the NASA film library in Houston looking through cans of film unopened for 30 years and remastering shots in high-definition video. That task included the tedious job of synchronizing the 16mm rolls shot by mission control with audio recordings from the mission controllers' voice loop that are now available through NASA's Web site. The soundtrack work was done so well, the finished product is seamless.
This still from the film shows a moment of tension as astronaut Buzz Aldrin suits up on July 16, 1969, launch day for Apollo 11. That mission would make the first successful landing on the moon.
