Strange New Worlds: Eolomea
Six ships operating out of space station Margot having failed to return in three days, Professor Maria Scholl is alarmed, calling for an immediate cessation of all space travel until the missing ships can be located, the crews accounted for and a reason for their absence determined, but to her surprise she is not supported by Professor Oli Tal, Director of the Experimental Centre for Transgalactic Connections.
Dismissing her concerns and disinterested in explanations even though his own daughter is among those missing, when another two ships are lost transit is finally suspended, stranding her own lover Daniel Lagny on Luna 3 along with Tal’s former pilot, Kun, with whom he once created a proposal to travel to the theorised world of Eolomea, its name meaning “eternal spring,” believed to be the source of an intense beam of light originating in Cygnus.
The third inclusion in Eureka’s Strange New Worlds four-film box set, presented from a 4K scan of the original 70mm camera negative, Eolomea is the most human of the films, directed by Herrmann Zschoche from a script by Willi Brückner and built around the relationship of Maria and Daniel (Cox Habbema and Ivan Andonov) seen in flashback from their first meeting while he was on leave in the Galapagos Islands.
The sandy beaches and sunshine a contrast to the Luna 3 outpost atop a crystalline outcrop from where the Sun is just a bright dot in the sky, so also are the characters in opposition, Daniel’s urge to end his contract and get back home paired with the older Kun (Vsevolod Sanayev) who accepts his post and makes no change even though he misses his son, Captain Sima (Benjamin Besson), Maria’s need for answers frustrated by the evasive indifference of Tal (Rolfe Hoppe), though it is clear that he is not an uncaring monster so much as following a different agenda.
Space travel once again presented as an established fact of future life, with space stations, outposts and whole fleets of ships being tracked through the skies, Eolomea is more colourful and optimistic than much of the science fiction of the seventies which tended towards clinical and dystopian by default, released in 1972, a year after The Andromeda Strain and a year before Soylent Green, maintaining an awareness of responsibility beyond duty and that progress sometimes requires breaking the rules.
Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA also includes The Silent Star (Der schweigende Stern), Signals – A Space Adventure (Signale – Ein Weltraumabenteuer), In the Dust of the Stars (Im Staub der Sterne), animated shorts The Robot and Janna and the Little Star, commentaries, archive interviews, newsreels and featurettes, a video essay and new interviews with science fiction scholar Mark Bould and Soviet cinema expert Claire Knight.
Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA is available on Blu-ray from Eureka now
