
Dark Side of the Moon
William Karel's film opens with the old puzzle of the flag rippling on an airless moon and builds from there into an elaborate case that the Apollo 11 landing was staged. Interview subjects include Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, and Buzz Aldrin, alongside a woman presented as Stanley Kubrick's widow, who claims the director was secretly recruited by the Nixon administration to film a fake landing on a soundstage using techniques from 2001: A Space Odyssey. NASA archival footage, Cold War space-race context, and studio-style reenactments are cut together with straight-faced authority, mimicking the look and rhythm of a serious historical documentary. The film never announces its own joke, letting the interviews accumulate until the fabrication becomes the point rather than the moon landing itself. Karel made it as satire of how easily conspiracy footage and expert testimony can be manufactured, and it has circulated for years with viewers genuinely unsure whether it is a hoax or an exposé. That confusion is the film's real subject.