
In the Shadow of the Moon
Between 1968 and 1972, nine American spacecraft carried astronauts to the Moon, and twelve men walked on its surface. This film gathers surviving members of that group, including Jim Lovell, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, and Alan Bean, sitting for interviews decades later to describe what the missions actually felt like from the inside. Their accounts run alongside NASA archival footage, much of it cleaned up and rarely seen, covering launch sequences, lunar surface walks, and the view of Earth shrinking to a small blue disc outside the capsule window. The astronauts talk about the technical risk of Apollo 11 and the near-disaster of Apollo 13, but the film spends more time on what the trip did to them afterward, the strange readjustment to ordinary life after standing somewhere no one had stood before. Buzz Aldrin's reflections on fame and depression sit next to Charlie Duke's account of faith renewed on the surface. Notably absent is Neil Armstrong, who declined to participate, a gap the other astronauts address directly.