Gagarine

Gagarine (2020) is a French drama laced with fantasy that you can watch online on iFILM. Sixteen-year-old Yuri has spent his whole life in the Gagarin Towers, a sprawling red-brick estate on the southern edge of Paris. He's obsessed with space and dreams of becoming an astronaut one day.

When the city announces that the crumbling complex will be torn down, Yuri refuses to leave. Together with his friend Diana and his pal Houssam he rewires circuits, grows plants in abandoned flats and slowly turns the doomed building into his own starship. The closer the bulldozers get, the more reality fuses with reverie: stairwells flicker like constellations and the boy's loneliness takes the shape of weightlessness. Alséni Bathily makes his debut in the lead, alongside Lyna Khoudri and Denis Lavant.

The first feature by Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh grew out of their own short and was shot inside the real Cité Gagarine in Ivry-sur-Seine, which truly was demolished in 2019. Yuri Gagarin himself once inaugurated the estate, and the directors turn this farewell to a concrete utopia into a tender fairy tale about home. The film was part of the 2020 Cannes selection. It's for viewers who love quiet, poetic cinema poised between social realism and dream. Stream Gagarine (2020) online on iFILM.