Mankind is bracing to send astronauts to Mars in the next decade. NASA’s mighty astronauts will step up to travel to a planet 73.243 million miles away while leaving everything they know behind. “The Longest Goodbye” seeks out to explore a reality that is all too common: loneliness.
The feature film premiered at Sundance on Jan. 19 and is up for the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.
It follows the work of Al Holland — a senior NASA psychologist who studies the effects of prolonged separation of individuals from Earth and is looking at ways to provide support to the red planet-bound explorers.
Director Ido Mizrahy, known for other nonfictional works like “Gored” and “Patrolman P,” asks intriguing questions that lead to some compelling and emotional answers, while setting the stage for the future of this two-year journey to Mars and back.
Ahead of the premiere, Mizrahy, who cowrote with Nir Sa’ar, sat down with the Deseret News and opened up about the conception of the idea, access to NASA and his own thoughts on space travel.
Filming from space
The work began in 2014 when a producer pitched a documentary about the space agency’s mission to Mars. Some digging led to Holland.
“I don’t even think they called him a psychologist, I think he had a different title, like ‘performance expert,’” said Mizrahy of the man who kept astronauts sane in outer space.
The 87-minute-long investigation first introduces the self-aware astronaut Kayla Barron and her husband Tom, a former submarine officer — who become central characters.
Barron was open to talking about the tension between life and space, said Mizrahy. She was a part of the mission to the International Space Station, which launched on Nov. 10, 2021, and concluded in six months.
Most striking were shots she took of herself doing mundane tasks, like eating or brushing her teeth, on the space station and sent to Mizrahy. While coordinating an interview from space was much harder as the filmmaker found himself on the big screen at mission control in New York.
Officially speaking to NASA employees requires jumping a lot of hoops NS navigating through the many public information officers, he confessed.
But former NASA astronaut Cady Coleman wasn’t off limits. In 2007, she spent six months on the space station. Footage from her time spent talking to her young son Jamey through a video chat allowed a peak into the frustrations of mothering from afar and with a shaky internet connection.
In one scene, she gives Jamey a virtual flute lesson while floating on the ISS. He’s sitting on the couch, trying to mimic the melody when suddenly, he stops to wipe away his tears.
“I think that was a fun experiment,” Cady speaks into her microphone consolingly. “So, we played the first family duet, that’s what I think.”
The now 20-something offered a vivid perspective on watching his mom leave planet Earth.
Exploring solutions
As the film project gained momentum, the pandemic struck, making the themes of isolation even more valuable but in a digestible way
“We might need a few more years before we can see a movie of ourselves locked up in our apartments,” Mizrahy said. “This story happens in a totally different world — it’s so much easier to lose ourselves in.”
But when the focus shifts to futuristic tools that can bridge the distance between space travelers and their loved ones — an idea worth pursuing — it feels slightly half-baked and separate from the rest.
Cimon 2.0, a talking-floating robot, and futuristic virtual reality programs may seem “Black Mirror”-esque, waiting to turn on humans, but they open the possibility of a saner space travel experience.
When asked if Mizrahy would consider venturing out into space himself, he said that he did a long time ago. But now he’s married with two children.
“When I started researching this in 2014, I was pretty shamelessly pitching myself as somebody who should be on that mission and I would say, ‘Look, you’re gonna have a doctor, a geologist, but where’s the storyteller? Who’s gonna tell the story?’”
‘The Longest Goodbye’ screenings:
- Saturday, Jan. 21, 2 p.m. MST: Public screening (Megaplex Theatres at The Gateway, SLC).
- Tuesday, Jan. 24, 6 p.m. MST: Public screening (Park Avenue Theatre, Park City).
- Friday, Jan. 27, 9 a.m. MST: Public screening (Prospector Square Theatre, Park City).