Welcome to Boca Chica, Texas. This is where Elon Musk has built his SpaceX launchpad. It’s also where Julien Elie went to make his new feature doc, Shifting Baselines (a world premiere earlier this week in international competition at VdR and sold by Filmotor).
The film is strikingly shot in black and white. “It’s really part of the narrative of the film. It’s not just an aesthetic aspect,” the Canadian director says of why he drained out the colour from the movie. “When I start a movie, I usually start with a photo or a sentence in a book and then I see an image in my mind. That image is either in colour or black and white. Then I build the film after that in that colour – or that absence of colour.”
“Basically, black and white for me is natural. It is the two basic colours pf photography,” Elie adds. “It’s rare that we do films in black and white…of course, reality is not in black and white but it is a tool to tell stories.”
When Elie first turned up in the desert at Boca Chica, he was immediately struck by how eerie the place seemed. This is desert terrain but now with huge rockets against the horizon. At first glance, the rockets don’t seem real. He was reminded of old sci fi movies – another reason to shoot in black and white.
The director is far less interested in Musk’s attempts to conquer space than he is in the human beings who live near the SpaceX site – and whose world has been transformed, often for the worse. Some have lost their homes. Others have seen their neighbours vanish. The documentary deals with pollution, environmental destruction, and the changing night sky.
Although many of the original inhabitants of Boca Chica have left already, “space junkie” tourists are turning up by the busload to watch the rocket launches.
“My previous movie [2023’s La Guardia Blanca] was about land devastation in Mexico…I had that obsession about lands that are disappearing physically but also from our collective memories.”
When he was growing up, Elie could look up at the sky and see stars, not just satellites launched by humans. “You and I knew a sky empty of satellites. The young kids in 20 years will see a moving sky because it will be a constellation of satellites, not of stars,” he protests.
The director met many of the characters who feature in the documentary by chance. He’d bump into them on the beach near the rocket site.
“Normally when I do my films, it’s a lot of investigation, many years of investigation. I don’t say there was no investigation here because we had to learn about astrophysics and talk with scientists. But sometimes the crew was asking me ‘what will we shoot today?’ And I’d say ‘I don’t know. We’ll go on the beach and meet people.’”
Among the characters the filmmakers ran into was Doug, a charismatic motorcyclist who looked as if he belonged in Easy Rider. Other scenes depicting characters milling around the launchpad are reminiscent of the Parisians featured in one of the director’s favourite movies, Jacques Tati’s observational comedy, Playtime (1967), showing characters both enraptured and baffled by modernity. “I didn’t try to make it look like a Tati film [but] it was like that.”
By the same token, Elie emphasises that it was never his intention to mock or satirise the space tourists. “Most of them were really interesting people. Like any human being, they just want to discover new worlds. This is so human…it would be too easy to laugh at those people.”
The film is very revealing about the side effects of the SpaceX takeover of the community – the social and ecological downsides that may not be immediately obvious.
“I don’t share any wishes of discovering Mars…yes, maybe, but in 35 years and not at the cost of destroying our own planet.”
Boca Chica has the Gulf of Mexico to its east. This is the “marginal” sea that President Trump wants to re-name as the “Gulf of America.” The director wryly notes that the locals are already beginning to call it the “Gulf of space debris” on account of all rocket detritus that now lands in its water.
“The situation is crazy and this is just the start of the situation…it was challenging for us but also really interesting to see all the changes in that small place.”
Elie was shooting in Boca Chica over two years, and even during that period the speed of transformation was astonishing. “Everything changed. Now, it’s almost a big city they’ve put in and they don’t respect any laws.”
This was supposed to be protected land, empty and full of pristine beaches. That is certainly not how it appears today. What were once public streets are now under private control.
Alongside the footage of the space rockets, the documentary also includes imagery of nature. “Seeing those beautiful birds just flying by those rockets is really sad. It is painful to see this. You wonder what we are doing now…it was a unique place, Boca Chica, but it is not anymore.”
At one stage, Ellie interviews a female scientist who patiently explains that bone density decreases in space and that it will therefore be nigh impossible to give birth on Mars. This is one aspect of space travel that seems to have eluded most of Elon Musk’s lieutenants.
“It’s all white men who have these projects, but they don’t realise for a minute that if they are going to colonise other planets, they will need women,” the director observes.
Shifting Baselines was made through Greenground Productions and Les Films Du 3 Mars with the collaboration of Cinema Belmopan. Following its Nyon screenings, the film will have its North American premiere at Hot Docs.
