U Are The Universe (4½ Stars)

This is the first film in the Stuttgart Weird Weekender Festival.

It's a relatively new film festival. It started last year as a spinoff of the monthly Weird Wednesday event. The Weird Wednesdays started ten years ago, showing mostly cult horror films. Mostly. There have been a few films that I wouldn't call weird, but as they say, weirdness is in the eye of the beholder. Recently the frequency has increased to two Wednesdays a month, one of which is a newly released low budget film. The festival is showing almost exclusively new low budget films.

Unlike the Fantasy Film Festival, which takes place simultaneously in several German cities, the Weird Weekender is a purely Stuttgart event.

Due to its niche appeal, the festival takes place in a relatively small theatre, which only has 102 seats. Here's the festival team. Judging by the abundance of bald heads in the audience, the team members are younger than the viewers. They held to the Weird Wednesday tradition of starting films late. There was a delay of 35 minutes. The German audience waited patiently. In England we would have been stamping our feet and jeering.

The opening film is "U Are The Universe", a Ukrainian science fiction film made in 2023. I don't approve of the title, but I'll let it pass, because the "U" is probably a reference to Ukraine. A Ukrainian astronaut called Andrukha has the job of delivering nuclear waste material to Jupiter's moon Callisto. It means a lot of solitude. Two years there, two years back. He's accompanied by a friendly floating robot called Max.

Max gives Andrukha the news that the Earth has exploded, making him the last human in the universe. There's no explanation why the Earth exploded. Maybe a Fascist dictator like Putin was tossing nuclear bombs around. The spaceship has enough food left for 16 months. Just when Andrukha is getting used to being the last man alive, he receives a message from a French woman called Catherine who's on a space station orbiting Saturn. He decides to travel to her. After all, the human race has to survive, doesn't it?

So the film is a love story set in space.

After the film there was a question and answer session with the director Pavlo Ostrikov by video link from Kyiv. Many of the questions dealt with his problems making a film in a country at war. For him the main problem was the money. Putin's invasion of Ukraine has caused massive inflation, and the film's production had to be paid in Euros. The film's budget lay beneath a million Euros, which might not seem much to us, but for him it was an enormous fortune.

He named "2001: A Space Odyssey" as his inspiration, but I saw more of "Dark Star" in it. He said that it's the first science fiction film made in Ukraine since it became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991.

While I was waiting, one of my friends said that the Weird Weekender wouldn't be a festival, it would be a trashtival. That's unfair. The only thing trashy about "U Are The Universe" is its title.