ATTACK THE BLOC: ScreenAnarchy Presents Kurt Maetzig's THE SILENT STAR

The ScreenAnarchy curated Attack The Bloc series of Cold War era science fiction films from the Eastern Bloc continues tonight at the TIFF Bell Lightbox with a rare screening of Kurt Maetzig's East German effort The Silent Star. Dramatically altered for US release as First Spaceship On Venus by Roger Corman, this is your chance to see the film as it was originally created and meant to be seen - projected from 35mm.

In the year 2003, with communism having conquered the globe and a new era of international peace, prosperity and cooperation secured, engineers discover what appears to be an alien artifact in the Gobi Desert. Scientists determine that the object is some kind of extraterrestrial flight recorder, and a partial decoding of its contents indicate that it came from a spaceship which originated from Venus. A multinational crew is sent to investigate the planet, where they find only the shattered remnants of an extinct civilization, and evidence of a terrible catastrophe that could portend doom for the Earth. Adapted from Stanislaw Lem's first published novel and dramatically altered by Roger Corman for its US release as First Spaceship on Venus, The Silent Star is a chilling cautionary tale of the dangers of technology run amok -- and its vision of a future where all nations cooperate for the common good establishes it as a kind of communist mirror image (and precursor) of the democratic utopia posited by Star Trek.

The screening kicks off at 9pm!