Gagarine

With ambitions of one day becoming an astronaut, the 16-year-old Youri dreams of spaceships and strange worlds without ever actually having left the small cosmos that is the ailing Gagarine social housing estate in the Parisian banlieue. Without parents – but equipped with sketches of all kinds, space maps and a shaky telescope – he lives in one of the countless apartments with a view of the French capital’s slums. However, his native red-brick cosmos is threatened when the dilapidated settlement is marked for demolition. As his friends and neighbours begin moving out of their apartments, Youri is determined to save the Gagarine in his own way. He is, after all, a tinkerer who knows how to fix things. A quiet battle begins to save what is still left, which is everything Youri has. The director duo Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s heart-warming feature debut combines a highly original form of fairy-tale drama with the real fate of the Parisian settlement Cité Gagarine, whose demolition was completed in 2019. (Zurich Film Festival)