Think it was Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin? Well, think again, because as Alexei Fedorchenko's unsettling debut film reveals, a Soviet cosmopilot, Ivan Kharlamov, actually went there and back in 1938, piloting his experimental and highly secretive craft back to Chile, from where he undertook an arduous journey across the Pacific, through China and Mongolia, and finally into Mother Russia. First on the Moon is a satiric yet touching expression of an unfettered utopian spirit-a sense of the limitless possibilities of human ingenuity and imagination-that characterized many people's vision of the Soviet experiment before its grim realities settled in.