BELGRADE, April 13. /TASS/. Serbia’s first screening of the Challenge motion picture which was partially filmed onboard the International Space Station (ISS) will be held on April 20, Russian Presidential Culture Aide Vladimir Tolstoy told TASS.

"The first screenings of the Challenge motion picture in Moscow started on Cosmonautics Day. I know that on April 20, this movie will come to Serbia as well," the official said.

"Currently, our movie theater chains are propped up by the appearance of major films which bring in the big bucks, such as Cheburashka, and now we are hoping that the Challenge movie will be a box office hit; after all, this is the first film in cinema history that was partially filmed in space. That creates quite a buzz. <...> We very much hope to support the industry with such major releases; it is important that movie chains not collapse. We just need more and better films; this does not depend directly on the [Cinema] Foundation, but on our production companies. We hope that everything will work out," Tolstoy, who also heads the Cinema Foundation of Russia, said.

As Culture Minister Olga Lyubimova said earlier, the Challenge motion picture will be screened in theaters across 20 countries, including Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia. Additionally, on April 27, the movie will open in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, Kuwait, Lebanon, the UAE, Oman, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Sudan.

The Challenge is the first motion picture to be shot in space at the International Space Station (ISS). The space drama was a joint project between Channel One, Glavcosmos, the Roscosmos state corporation, the Yellow, Black and White studio and the START online movie theater with support from the Cinema Foundation. The plot follows a female doctor who has to prepare for a space flight within a month owing to some specific circumstances and travel to the orbital outpost to save a cosmonaut’s life.

On October 5, 2021, actress Yulia Peresild and film director Klim Shipenko traveled to the ISS onboard the Soyuz MS-19 spaceship together with professional cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov. Two other cosmonauts - Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov - also took part in the film-making process. Peresild and Shipenko returned to Earth in the descent capsule of the spacecraft Yury Gagarin (Soyuz MS-18). Shkaplerov and Dubrov returned from the ISS on March 30. Co-starring in the film were Milos Bikovic, Vladimir Mashkov and others.