Filming is underway on Chaika, a historical drama about Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova and her three-day spaceflight aboard Vostok-6 in 1963. The production is scheduled for release on April 8, 2027.
Crews at the Moskino film park have reconstructed the Baikonur Cosmodrome as it looked in 1963, using large blue chromakey screens so large they had to be raised and held in place by cranes. A correspondent for Rossiyskaya Gazeta observed filming of the scene in which Tereshkova prepares for liftoff.
Leonela Manturova plays Tereshkova. The space suit her character wears weighs around 20 kilograms. Manturova told reporters she feels comfortable in it in the shade but that it heats up quickly in direct sunlight. A tight-fitting inner cap worn beneath the helmet sometimes makes it hard for her to hear directions from the crew, and she frequently lifts it slightly during conversations.
Elena Tereshkova, daughter of Valentina Tereshkova, was present on set. She added to Manturova’s account of the heat, explaining that modern spacesuits have ventilation systems that earlier models lacked. She also noted that even with temperature regulated, cosmonauts’ feet become very cold at a certain point during launch because the force of acceleration drives blood away from the legs toward the head.
A Long Negotiation
Elena Tereshkova said her mother resisted approving a film for a long time. One reason Valentina Tereshkova eventually agreed, her daughter said, was a desire to show the collective effort of an entire country that went into preparing the first female spaceflight. Elena Tereshkova said they spoke at length with her mother, arguing that the time had come to show the heroism not only of male cosmonauts but of women as well.
She added that the first cosmonauts were heading, in essence, into the unknown, and that the grueling training and testing they endured, for both men and women, was another factor that persuaded Valentina Tereshkova to give her blessing.
The script was discussed in detail with Tereshkova herself. According to her daughter, Valentina Tereshkova dislikes it when real events are freely embellished with fictional details. Every step, gesture, line, and action was agreed with her, Elena Tereshkova said, though some artistic improvisation remains in the film, handled as carefully as possible. She summarized the film’s central message as: if you have a dream, follow it.
Director and Cast
Director Anton Megerdichev said Chaika differs from his previous work in its close attention to the inner life of its protagonist. A significant portion of the film shows Tereshkova alone inside a cramped capsule, and the isolation is felt most acutely on the far side of Earth, when contact with ground services temporarily cuts out.
Megerdichev said his core aim is for audiences to feel how serious a human ordeal spaceflight was, describing it as a genuine act of courage he said he personally could not have matched. The crew is using slow-motion photography for certain scenes, shooting at frame rates from 32 to several hundred frames per second; in those scenes, actors must deliver their lines at accelerated speed so that speech aligns with lip movements when the footage is slowed to normal rate.
Alexei Kravchenko plays rocket engineer Sergei Korolev and told journalists that the offer surprised him given his limited physical resemblance to Korolev. He said very little video footage of Korolev exists, making it difficult to find behavioral reference points, and that he had to work largely from written accounts and descriptions. Kravchenko noted that Korolev was a stern leader who rarely showed his feelings, yet in the film his relationship with Tereshkova resembles that of a father and daughter, a warmth that surfaces when he calls her by the affectionate diminutive Chayechka over the radio instead of her official call sign.
Sergei Gorodnichiy, known for the television series Landyshi, plays a mature Gagarin in his role as flight director for Tereshkova’s mission. Gorodnichiy said he had to move away from the familiar image of Gagarin as a charming young man with a world-famous smile and find a more serious, purposeful quality in the character. He said preparing for the role changed how he felt about the first spaceflight emotionally, and that he came to feel the full weight of what it meant to go first when there was no guarantee of coming back.
A set representing the flight control bunker was built after part of the crew visited Baikonur to study the original. Gorodnichiy recalled a scene the crew called the running scene, in which Gagarin and Tereshkova discuss why she wants to go to space. He said the scene took twelve hours to shoot in various locations but produced something that felt genuinely alive.
Alexei Kravchenko as Sergei Korolev and Kirill Zaytsev as cosmonaut training chief Nikolai Kamanin round out the main historical cast alongside Gorodnichiy.
