Cosmographies is a hybrid film that draws from modes of speculative fiction, observational and poetic documentary, activism, and Indigiqueer approaches. Māori astrobiologist Xuê Noon (played by Australian/Māori artist Victoria Hunt) finds solace in Mars in 2051 as a leader from the Aotearoa Space Agency on an international scientific mission, following the discovery of dormant microorganisms by the NASA Mars Sample Return Mission in 2039. Xuê wanders across this sentient planet and reflects on the newly found lifeforms as she grows plants in a glasshouse. Through the spirit of an ancient taniwha, she slipstreams in spacetime to the Atacama Desert in 2023 where she lived as an Indigenous scientist years earlier. In Atacama the film engages with numerous ongoing life-and-death struggles for land and water justice led by Indigenous communities, activists, and scientists in this old, vital yet scarred desert. Through interviews and conversations, the film depicts centuries old and ongoing forms of social injustice and ecological degradation to weave a critical allegory against the renewed commercial impulse of a new space age rampaging in the 2020’s. Xuê is not returning to Earth. She reads fragments from a diary she has titled Cosmographies. As she contemplates her own death on Mars (becoming stardust) Xuê slipstreams one final time to visit her younger self in Rotorua, Aotearoa, during a cold August night in 2003, when Earth and Mars were at their closest in 60,000 years. The film brings a message urging us to support land and water defenders in the Atacama desert and to rethink the cosmos not as a frontier to conquer, but as a delicate ecology to which our planet is intimately and ancestrally connected
Running time: 01:33:45