SXSW Film

Lunarcy!

This first documentary feature from director Simon Ennis highlights a group of people – well, men – who are obsessed with the moon. There's a former astronaut and bona fide moonwalker among them – Alan Bean of NASA's Apollo 12 mission – but the others are strictly earthbound citizens, just more relentlessly focused on our biggest satellite. Among them: Christopher Carson, a young and painfully sincere übergeek who yearns to be the first person to live on the moon; Dennis Hope, a former ventriloquist who's got the cojones to claim ownership of the moon and makes a living selling deeds to lunar property; and the endearing, grandfatherly Peter Kokh, longtime president and champion of the Moon Society. Ennis does a fine job of presenting these moonstruck men and more, providing pop-culture context with clips from a variety of media, limning the quirky lunatics with empathy, gentle humor, and dynamic pacing.