Aleksei Uchitel's Sputnik-inspired drama is Russia's sole contender at the Moscow International Film Festival. Tom Birchenough reports on the upcoming showdown.

Judging by the films in its main competition, the 27th Moscow International Film Festival, or MIFF, won't be wildly better or worse than previous incarnations. The main difference is that the focus of this year's festival, which starts Friday and runs to June 26, has shifted away from Russia: only one homegrown film, Aleksei Uchitel's Dreaming of Space ("Kosmos kak predchustviye"), is competing for an award. ... While the relative lack of Russian presence may be explained by the details of ongoing production schedules, it appears that the festival's organizers went to considerable effort to secure Uchitel's film in the competition program.

After Dreaming was lauded by MIFF president and director Nikita Mikhalkov, Uchitel withdrew the film from last week's Kinotaur competition in Sochi to enable it to appear at the Moscow event instead.

Uchitel is no stranger to MIFF. His previous film, The Stroll ("Progulka"), opened the festival two years ago, although it failed to win any prizes. With Dreaming, Uchitel has moved away from the contemporary St. Petersburg setting of The Stroll to a more distinctive historical context. Dreaming is set in the Soviet era – specifically, in 1957, the year that the country launched its first space satellite.

With the dawn of the age of space exploration, the predominant mood in Soviet society is a new feeling of optimism. This mood, however, doesn't translate directly into the everyday lives of the film's four main characters, who live in a northern port city where interaction with the outside world comes only with the occasional visits of foreign ships. The prolific Yevgeny Mironov stars alongside Irina Pegova, who played the lead role in The Stroll. Uchitel proved that he could deliver period detail in His Wife's Diary, a drama about émigré writer Ivan Bunin that Russia put forward for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2000, although it failed to make the final five. Like with that film, there's plenty of expectation that Dreaming will score considerably on the international scene. ...