As we watch the travails of Mir each day on the news, we wonder where Mir and its inhabitants will be at the time of this screening. Meanwhile, back on Earth, this strange and wonderful documentary by Andrei Ujica, a Romanian-born filmmaker who lives in Germany.In May 1991, cosmonauts Anatoli Artzebarsky and Sergei Krikalev blasted off for the Mir space station, ostensibly for a few months' work. Anatoli, whose lyric observations illuminate this film, did return after five months. (He is now in charge of Mir repairs from Earth.) But events, as the world turns, conspired to keep Sergei in space for almost a year. For during his revolutions another revolution was taking place on Earth, namely, the demise of the Soviet Union that had sent him up in the first place. If Ujica's documentary was, as the Village Voice notes, "directed from Earth but shot in space," with footage taken in and from the spacecraft, the images of the events of August 1991 seem to have been directed from space: tanks rolling through Moscow as people go about their business, Gorby's radio plea (which the cosmonauts were the first to transmit to the rest of the world), and the murky, nighttime maneuvers of politics about to be brought into the light of day. It may have been the postwar era's most impressive change but Sergei is not impressed; he's still in awe of "the seasons, changing as we look." Conversely, when asked what most amazes them about Earth as seen from space, the cosmonauts answer, "What we can't see: people." Everyone's a poet.