Photo — David Leclerc
Before Galileo turned his telescope toward the sky, people thought of the moon as a giant mirror whose summits and valleys reflected earth’s seas and mountains. When the Soviets sent a probe around the moon and captured never-seen-before images, people were stunned to see its surface extensively pockmarked by celestial debris. American scientists talked at great length about the disfigured face of the moon—no doubt because the characteristics of its hidden side were named after Russian cosmonauts, inventors and poets.
The Far Side of the Moon concentrates on the stormy relationship of two brothers with conflicting ambitions and their unlikely reconciliation following their mother’s death. The story is set against the backdrop of the 1960s Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States, where the losers might not be the ones we would think.
The line between the insignificant and the sublime is sometimes thin. Through visual poetry, the main character, Philippe, moves from the banality of everyday life to the majesty of space, escaping the gravity of earth to reach for the lightness of the starry void.
By being interested in some chapters of the conquest of space, I was forced, despite myself, to revisit my childhood and a significant part of my adolescence. It was an appointment I was trying to push back for a long time and the creation of this show has cornered me at the foot of the wall. The most difficult thing was surely to discover that my youth – which I thought sunny – bathed most of the time in the blue and gray tones of the moon. I hope that this story of reconciliation between two brothers will touch you and awaken in you a little lunar nostalgia – Robert Lepage
