Aelita: Queen of Mars

The Soviet Union's first science fiction film — and one of the most visually extravagant productions of early Soviet cinema. An engineer in Moscow, consumed by jealousy over his wife and frustrated by the drudgery of post-revolutionary life, builds a rocket ship and travels to Mars, where he finds an oppressed worker class ruled by a beautiful but tyrannical queen and leads them in revolution. The Martian sequences, designed by the Constructivist artist Alexandra Exter, are stunning: geometric costumes, angular sets, and a visual language unlike anything else in 1920s cinema. The earthbound scenes offer a fascinatingly candid portrait of everyday life in the early USSR. A wild hybrid of agitprop, domestic melodrama, and interplanetary spectacle that feels genuinely ahead of its time.