Mercury XX (trailer)
Mercury XX is a science fiction short Film which tells the story of an all female space mission to draw the first breath on another planet.
After an astronauts decade-long journey across the stars accompanied only by her spaceships AI she becomes conflicted with the realization of having to leave her sole friend behind or taking this next breath for humankind.
The film is inspired by the Mercury 13, a group of 13 female aviators in the Fifties, who secretly underwent all the required tests and preparations for NASA’s Apollo program. Ultimately they were rejected and never flew a mission despite often outperforming their male competitors.
Mercury XX rewrites this history and presents a feminist driven Sci-Fi film, a future that is wild, messy, visceral and fleshy, not the masculine, mechanical and surgically clean visions of contemporary space exploration. To design the original look of the film an AI model was trained on thousands of space fashion images and was tasked with developing speculative sketches of costumes and the fictional spaceship.
Miriam Kuhlmann