Afghan filmmaker Elham Ehsas’s new short film, *Forgotten Spaceman*, revisits the largely overlooked story of Abdul Ahad Momand, Afghanistan’s first and only cosmonaut, who travelled to space in 1988. Ehsas argues that Momand’s achievement and the optimism it inspired were overshadowed by the civil war and displacement that followed, reflecting how conflict has marginalised Afghan scientific and cultural history.

The film combines documentary and essay elements with Ehsas’s own family history, and examines colonialism and the memory of a fractured nation. It will have its world premiere on 9 August at the 79th Locarno Film Festival; Ehsas wrote, directed and edited it, with support from Ken Loach’s Sixteen Films. Momand’s call to his mother made Pashto the fourth language spoken in space, after Russian, English and Mandarin.