Russian director Egor Abramenko makes his feature debut with Sputnik, which merges the sci-fi genre with compelling human drama.
Russia, 1983: Cold War tensions are at their peak. A terrifying scene of devastation is discovered at the landing site of spacecraft Orbit-4. Only one crew member, Konstantin (Pyotr Fyodorov), has survived, but he has lost his memory from the horrific experience and cannot shed light on the cause of the accident. In a secluded government facility, under the vigilant watch of armed guards, psychiatrist Tatiana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina) attempts to reverse the astronaut’s amnesia and unravel the mystery. In the process, she learns that Orbit-4 may have carried back an alien parasite that threatens to consume them all…
Egor Abramenko graduated from The Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in 2009 and has worked extensively as a director of music videos and commercials. In 2017, his sci-fi thriller short film The Passenger (which later inspired Sputnik) was selected for the Fantastic Fest Film Festival. Principal photography for Sputnik took place in Moscow in the winter of 2018-2019. Most of the film’s scenes were shot at a real science facility – The Shemyakin Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry.
“It was very important for us to keep everything in the film as close to real life of that time period as possible,” said Abramenko. “We scouted Moscow and St. Petersburg extensively in search of what we needed – doors, walls, corridors. We found several locations that were well preserved, but each of them was missing either one thing or the other. We searched for months until we found The Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry at The Russian Academy of Sciences. This unique place determined the aesthetics of the style of our film.” 
“The story takes place in 1983 – that was a deliberate choice,” added Andrei Zolotarev, screenwriter. “We could have chosen a more modern setting, but we felt that the ‘80s was better suited to our story. It was a transitional time of uncertainty, when it was clear that a huge country was beginning to collapse into the unknown, the time when the Cold War was about to end. It was a period when the question “Who am I really?” was being asked, not just by those in the Soviet Union, but all over the world.”
Sputnik was scheduled to have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2020 prior to the festival’s being postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.