The Farthest
When: 7pm 26th Jan, 2018
Where: Eye Cinema, Galway Adult ticket is €9.20 Student €7.00 Book here
Is it humankind’s greatest achievement? 12 billion miles away a tiny spaceship is leaving our Solar System and entering the void of deep space. It is the first human-made object ever to do so. Slowly dying within its heart is a plutonium generator that will beat for perhaps another decade before the lights on Voyager finally go out. But this little craft will travel on for millions of years, carrying a Golden Record bearing recordings and images of life on Earth. In all likelihood Voyager will outlive humanity and all our creations. It could be the only thing to mark our existence. Perhaps some day an alien will find it and wonder.
The story of Voyager is an epic of human achievement, personal drama and almost miraculous success. Launched 16 days apart in Autumn 1977, the twin Voyager space probes have defied all the odds, survived countless near misses and almost 40 years later continue to beam revolutionary information across unimaginable distances. With less computing power than a modern hearing aid, they have unlocked the stunning secrets of our Solar System on a journey as revolutionary as the first circumnavigation of the globe and mankind’s first footprint on the moon.
In this powerful, poetic and cinematic feature documentary, THE FARTHEST celebrates these magnificent machines, the men and women who built them and the vision that propelled them farther than anyone could ever have hoped. Launched from a fractious planet, these pioneers sail on serenely in the darkness – an enduring testament to the ingenuity of mankind and the untapped limits of the human imagination.
Passionate organic storytelling with people, images, archive and opinion woven with daring and brio makes THE FARTHEST a genuinely cinema-scale adventure.
Other Reading
The New York Times, Aug 3 2017, published a brilliant piece about the engineers who keep the probes alive and kicking well past its mission specs.
Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years, Dec 1 2017
The Director – Emer Reynolds
Director Emer Reynolds is an Emmy nominated multi-award winning documentary director and feature film editor, based in Dublin, Ireland.
THE FARTHEST, her feature documentary on the trail-blazing Voyager spacecraft, described by Screen Daily as “ cathartic and moving .. the right film at the right time”, made its debut at the Audi Dublin International Film Festival, where it picked up three awards including the Audience Award and Best Irish Documentary, and has just had its International Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
Emer most recently directed HERE WAS CUBA, a feature documentary on the Cuban Missile Crisis described by the Hollywood Reporter as “a real-life end-of-the-world-thriller”. The film was commissioned by US Public Broadcaster PBS as their landmark documentary to mark the 50th
anniversary of the crisis – the closest humankind has come to nuclear destruction. In the UK, the film premiered at the prestigious Sheffield Film Festival, was broadcast by Channel 4, nominated for a Grierson Award – the UK’s top documentary prize before going on to feature in film festivals worldwide garnering widespread acclaim for its riveting storytelling.
Emer also edited ‘Here Was Cuba’ winning Best Editing at the 2014 Irish Film & Television Awards (IFTAs) for the film. She again won the IFTA for Best Editing in 2015 for another feature documentary, ‘One Million Dubliners’ to add to her three previous Best Editing IFTAs for the feature films ‘Timbuktu’, ‘My Brothers’ and Channel 4’s groundbreaking drama series ‘Shameless’.
Over the last two decades, Emer’s work has spanned feature films, TV Drama and documentary including editing one of the most successful Irish feature films of all time ‘I Went Down’.
Documentaries Emer has worked on include the multi award winning, twice Emmy nominated wildlife feature ‘Broken Tail’ and the three times Emmy nominated ‘On a River in Ireland made for the BBC & PBS and notable as the most awarded wildlife film in the world of the past two years. Emer has also written and directed four short dramas and directed a 6 part drama series ‘Trouble in Paradise’ for RTE.
Emer studied Physics & Maths at Trinity College Dublin and has a lifelong passion for space exploration.
“In the 4.5 billion years of Planet Earth, modern humans have been around for barely 200,000 years, have developed technology in the last few hundred and have just now reached interstellar space. The story of Voyager thrills me to the core”
— Emer Reynolds
