COSMOGRAPHIES

SPECULATIVE DOCUMENTARY FICTION

The struggle for environmental justice against ongoing forms of extractivism and ecological ruin in the Atacama Desert is an allegory against ongoing plans to colonise the Moon and Mars, where Māori astrobiologist Xuê Noon finds solace in 2051.

Australia/Chile, 2024
95 min
4K DCI – 16:9 – colour
Dolby 5.1 sound

DIRECTOR
Juan Francisco Salazar

PERFORMANCE
Victoria Hunt

ORIGINAL MUSIC/SOUND DESIGN
James Peter Brown

FIELD PRODUCER
(AOTEAROA/NEW ZEALAND)
Victoria Hunt

WRITTEN BY
Juan Francisco Salazar
Victoria Hunt

EDITOR
Rowena Crowe

LOCATION SOUND RECORDING
Moe Clark
Juan Francisco Salazar

CULTURAL ADVISORS
Félix Galleguillos Aymani
(Lickanantay)
Rosie Te Rauawhea Belvie
(Māori)

EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS
Alejandra Canales
Juan Francisco Salazar

CAMERA
Juan Francisco Salazar

FIELD PRODUCER (CHILE)
Valentina Figueroa

COSTUME DESIGN
Flora Vilches
Boris Bagattini
Matthew Stegh
Samara Davis
Victoria Hunt
Juan Francisco Salazar

SYNOPSIS

Cosmographies is a hybrid film that draws from modes of speculative fiction, observational and poetic documentary, activism, and Indigiqueer approaches. Māori astrobiologist Xuê Noon (played by Australian/Māori artist Victoria Hunt) finds solace in Mars in 2051 as a leader from the Aotearoa Space Agency on an international scientific mission, following the discovery of dormant microorganisms by the NASA Mars Sample Return Mission in 2039. Xuê wanders across this sentient planet and reflects on the newly found lifeforms as she grows plants in a glasshouse. Through the spirit of an ancient taniwha, she slipstreams in spacetime to the Atacama Desert and to Aotearoa.

In Atacama the film engages with numerous ongoing life-and-death struggles for land and water justice led by Indigenous communities, activists, and scientists in this old, vital yet scarred desert. Through interviews and conversations, the film depicts centuries old and ongoing forms of social injustice and ecological degradation to weave a critical allegory against the renewed commercial impulse of a new space age rampaging in the 2020’s.

Xuê is not returning to Earth. She reads fragments from a diary she has titled Cosmographies. As she contemplates her own death on Mars (becoming stardust) Xuê slipstreams one final time to visit her younger self in Rotorua, Aotearoa, during a cold August night in 2003, when Earth and Mars were at their closest in 60,000 years. The film brings a message urging us to support land and water defenders in the Atacama desert and to rethink the cosmos not as a frontier to conquer, but as a delicate ecology to which our planet is intimately and ancestrally connected.

Produced in consultation with Toconao Indigenous Lickanantay Community, Salar de Atacama, Chile.

Astounding … builds such an unbreakable moral case to ask us to stop and consider this place before we go elsewhere. It does all this with so much respect and reverence, though - and while there is anger and rage and pain coursing through it, there is also so much love. For the land, for this planet, for the cosmos.

Ceridwen Dovey

Author of Only the Astronauts

Abismado en el peligroso presente, entre un pasado conectado con el cosmos y un futuro devastado que no deja de soñar, el hermoso y esperanzador film Cosmografias hace de la poética de la humanidad vinculada al universo un acto político inconformista con imágenes que resuenan a vida y con historias llenas de semillas.

Christian Aylwin

Director de Isidora y Mosca.

A must see, visually stunning documentary … decolonial futurities meet Indigenous storytelling, conferring a reality to the idea, dear to Black, Indigenous, Feminist and Queer sensibilities, that temporalities and spaces merge to better disrupt capitalist and colonial regimes of linearity.

Julie Patarin-Jossec

Author of La Fabrique de l'Astronaute, filmmaker and art performer,
La moule résistante productions.

In vividly visualising our Indigenous relational worldview, Cosmographies is a rare, beautiful, and insightful journey toward Custodianship of Country. Realising solidarity across Indigenous Peoples globally, this is a profound and necessary film for all.

Madison Shakespeare

Saltwater ochre and Song Woman, born on and of Gadigal
Country, East Coast of Australia.

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