19-03-2025
‘Shifting Baselines,' Examining SpaceX's Impact on Boca Chica, Home to Elon Musk's Starbase, Picked Up by Filmotor (EXCLUSIVE)
Prague-based doc specialist Filmotor has picked up the rights for Julien Elie's 'Shifting Baselines,' set to have its world premiere in the international feature competition at leading doc festival Visions du Réel.
'I first encountered the project at VdR-Work in Progress last year and immediately felt the strong urgency to distribute this poetic and creative documentary about the space race and Space X. After the American elections, we felt it even more… It's crucial that we pay attention not only to the events on our planet but also to what's happening in space and our orbit,' Filmotor CEO, Michaela Čajková, tells Variety.
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Set in the Texan border town of Boca Chica, 'Shifting Baselines' examines the transformation of the area due to SpaceX's Starbase, the rocket launch facility that serves as a primary testing and production ground for Elon Musk's Starship launch vehicles, which he hopes will take Man to Mars.
Located on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, it is surrounded by protected lands, part of a national wildlife refuge home to hundreds of species, including sea turtles and rare birds. Some of this land is now littered with rocket debris from failed launches.
When Elie first arrived in Boca Chica with his camera in 2022, he had little idea of what he would find. What he discovered, he tells Variety, was a striking setting for a film.
'For a filmmaker, it's a dream: it's like a cinema set! You even have the characters because there are people from all over the world – Japan, China, Canada, America. They talk to you about their fears, about how bad the world is doing, about the pandemic. People just like the idea of escaping this world.'
Elie draws a parallel between the space enthusiasts – who proudly wear 'Occupy Mars' T-shirts – and their ancestors, who took over indigenous lands in America. Just as earlier colonization led to the displacement and massacre of native peoples, these space pioneers now view Mars as the next frontier.
'I mean, we probably will go to Mars, maybe 25 or 30 years from now, not in two or three years. But people are really convinced. [They think] everything is destroyed here, so we have to escape, we need to have a plan B planet, rather than try to make things better here on Earth,' says Elie.
'That's what the film talks about: the nonsense of humanity's endless drive to conquer every available territory. Now, the sky is the ultimate limit.'
With most of Boca Chica's homes bought up by SpaceX, the village has been turned into a sprawling compound for hundreds of workers, an entire ecosystem built around the Starbase.
The film takes viewers on a cinematic black-and-white journey through the village and its surroundings, to meet the few remaining residents, the space enthusiasts drawn to the site, and the activists raising alarms about its environmental impact.
Elie also interviews astrophysicists, who are part of a growing number of scientists warning of the growing risks posed by the unchecked expansion of satellite networks and space debris.
'They help us understand the danger posed by the space race, the contamination caused by satellites and space debris. The small village of Boca Chica is like the meeting point of that contamination, between the sky and the Earth, where biologists are trying to preserve birds' nests in a place that's being destroyed by human activity,' he says.
The film's title was inspired by a concept coined by marine biologist Daniel Pauly, who also appears in the doc: 'Shifting Baselines explains our habituation to environmental changes,' Elie explains. 'Watching the sky transform with the proliferation of satellites, I thought of applying this concept, which was first invented to explain the disappearance of fish, to the new space conquest that will transform the sky forever.'
The monochromatic aesthetic lends the film a poetic, dramatic quality which seemed fitting. 'When I first saw those rockets, I thought they looked like they were from another age, another civilization,' Elie says.
'This film is like a portrait of humanity today, as if captured by others. Black and white creates a kind of distance… Are they fake? Are they toys? When you look at the SpaceX installation and those rockets, it feels like you're in a 1960s science fiction movie from Russia or Eastern Europe,' he smiles.
Elie's previous credits include 2018 multi-award winner 'Dark Suns,' about the epidemic of femicides in Mexico, and 'La Garde Blanche' (2023), also set in Mexico, which explores the terror and violence forged by the collusion between big corporations, drug cartels and the government.
'Shifting Baselines' is produced by Elie, Andreas Mendritzki and Aonan Yang at Montreal-based GreenGround Productions. It will have its world premiere at Visions du Réel on April 5.
Visions du Réel runs from April 4 to 13 in Nyon, Switzerland.
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