Oh, what a little moonlight can do

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

Great idea: interview the 12 surviving crew member from the nine Apollo missions to the Moon.

Second great idea: get hold of archive material of Moon-shots from NASA - some of it never before used.

The result is In the Shadow of the Moon. Heres a third good idea: see it.

Its a simple, simply wonderful film, with few trimmings.

The astronauts talk directly to camera. Theres no narration, no animation, no reconstructions (though the gaps left by a few unfilmed moments from Apollo 11 have been filled by shots from other missions).

Yes, its nostalgic. Yes, we know the ending. Yes, weve seen the Moonwalk many times. Yes, its focus is narrow: no questioning about the relevance of the whole exercise, no comments from the mens families.

But its touching, funny, revealing not least about the make-do-and-mend way in which the entire enterprise was put together with paper and pencil and less computing power than in a mobile phone - once President Kennedy had set it in motion.

Its history, too: capturing the views of the only people in the history of the world to have left Earth and looked back at it, and capturing the last vestiges of innocent derring-do from another age.

The absent presence is the reclusive Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon. But director David Sington makes a virtue of even that. In a Q&A at the Sundance Festival he said: We do get an interesting portrait of him from the other astronauts, but he inevitably remains slightly anonymous, a sort of astronaut Everyman and I came to like that about the movie.

Armstrong has said that any one of a number of astronauts might have been the first on the Moon, and that it just happened to him, and so his own personal reactions and experiences are beside the point. And you know what? I think I agree with him!

* 19 March, Barbican Centre

* Trailer