Forgotten Spaceman

When Abdul Ahad Momand became the first Afghan astronaut to travel into space in 1988, it sparked a wave of hope in the war-torn country. Four years later, Momand was living in Germany and had to abandon his dreams, like so many other Afghans in the diaspora. Filmmaker Elham Ehsas sees parallels with his own family history, also coloured by exile and migration. His father, a successful journalist, fled the war and settled in the United Kingdom, abandoning his career.

Clicking through nostalgic, grainy, orange-tinted television footage of news broadcasts and late-1980s pop culture, Ehsas traces how his family’s history became intertwined with that of Afghanistan. The astronaut’s story illustrates the geopolitical forces at work, in space travel and beyond. Set against this is the ironic fact that, viewed from space, national borders don’t exist.