Original title (UK): Ти – Космос (You - Space)
Dystopian dramas are as old as science fiction itself, but Ukrainian director Pavlo Ostrikov breathes new life into this well-worn trope. Andriy (Volodymyr Kravchuk) is flying alone on a garbage-scow spaceship, delivering nuclear waste to a distant Jovian moon, when he learns that a global calamity has essentially erased life on Earth. His only comrade for his remaining years of isolation is Maxim (voice of Leonid Popadko), a Kubrickian artificial intelligence designed to raise Andriy’s spirits with deadpan wisecracks—that is, until Andriy discovers a broadcast from one planet over. The unseen sender, Catherine (voiced by Alexia Depicker), is a lone Frenchwoman on a space station destined to crash into Saturn in a few months. The de facto couple become Earth’s last possible hope for humanity as Andriy and Maxim race to steer the ship toward an improbable rescue. While written before Russia’s real-life 2022 invasion, filming was completed in Kyiv while the first missile attacks few overhead, giving Ostrikov’s feature debut a frisson of impending mortality. Regardless of current events, U Are the Universe is a timeless tale of love, hope, and loneliness and a warmhearted, low-tech homage to the great existential sci-fi epics of the 1970s.