In 1989, during Soviet cosmonaut's Sergei Krikalev record-breaking 18-month mission on the Mir space station, the Soviet Union collapsed. Krikalev's hometown was Leningrad when he left and St. Petersburg when he returned. His accomplishment is notable in and of itself, as Ujica amply illustrates in this documentary, yet by juxtaposing this feat with the monumental events unfolding on Earth, Out of the Present renders Krikalev's journey into a breathtaking elegy for the end of the Space Age and the end of an ideology. Mixing video from the space station with his own film material – including the first 35mm film ever exposed in space – Ujica likewise interweaves fact and fiction through references both obvious and subtle to Kubrick's 2001 (1968) and Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) launching the thrilling existential quandaries of those films into present-day reality. – DP