The concept of space travel in storytelling has been with us since our ancestors first created an oral history of animals, people and objects moving across the night sky to explain the shifting constellations. Ever since, we humans have been incessant stargazers.

    Premiering at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the Swedish film ANIARA is a saga of human migration and survival created by necessity as our Earth is rendered uninhabitable. It sparks our curiosity and literally opens new worlds, featuring adventure, romance, and the role of artificial intelligence along with confrontation of the unknown.

    With substantial intellectual and emotional heft, ANIARA is an engrossing drama in the tradition of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Oddysey and Tarkovsky's Solaris. With storyline roots going back sixty years, it is also a microcosm of the human condition, capturing the tenets of our culture and the importance of hope. Unspoken but omnipresent is the invitation for us to consider how we treat our own spaceship, Planet Earth.

    Written in the 1950s, the origins of the story are fascinating, as is the life of its Swedish author Harry Martinson, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Worth reading: a survey of Martinson's life and works at Nobelprize.org and a discussion of Aniara and its incarnations at Wikipedia.

SYNOPSIS

    Director Pella Kagerman (TIFF interview here), gives us a film for thinking people, with one male and three female protagonists, led by Emelie Jonsson. The story is set in the not-so-distant future where humans, technology and space intersect, with unforeseen results. "Aniara" is also the name of the self-sustaining space vessel bound for Mars, with multitudes on board leaving behind the climate change catastrophes - floods, fires, famine and wars - that have ravaged their home planet.

    Something goes wrong on the journey – the vessel is damaged by space debris, knocking out navigation and communication. As the inhabitants deal with the discovery that the spaceship may become their permanent home, the central character, MR (Jonsson), becomes the glue that holds things together, working in concert with MIMA, an artificial intelligence designed to enhance passenger well-being. With diminishing hope of survival the passengers learn how life becomes meaningless without a destination.

    "There's a risk that ANIARA might become our future," director Pella Kagerman said at TIFF. "The questions the film addresses are extremely relevant today."