52 Films by Women Vol 5. 32. PROXIMA (Director: Alice Winocour)
Most films about space travel tend to be high-concept action adventures. In director Michael Bay’s 1998 film Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck, for instance, a team of oil drillers are sent into space to neutralise an asteroid that threatens to devastate the planet. By contrast, Alice Winocour’s third film as director, Proxima, shot on location in actual space training facilities, is a much smaller, more intimate affair. Co-written by Jean-St é phane Bron, with whom Winocour collaborated on her previous film, the PTSD bodyguard thriller, Disorder , it shows French astronaut Sarah Loreau (Eva Green) in her final preparations for departure from Earth for a minimum one-year mission to Mars. She could not be more excited. However, she is leaving behind her young daughter, Stella (Z é lie Boulant-Lemesle). Stella is a sullen child, having been diagnosed with dyslexia, dyscalculia and dysorthographia, which means she has difficulty reading, understanding mat...