In 1988, an Afghan man orbiting Earth brewed tea for his crew aboard the Mir space station and spoke Pashto into the void — the fourth language ever heard beyond the atmosphere. His name is Abdul Ahad Momand, and he remains the first and only Afghan cosmonaut. Now his story is reaching screens.

Forgotten Spaceman, a short film by London-based Afghan filmmaker Elham Ehsas, will world-premiere on 9 August in the Pardi di Domani — Concorso Internazionale selection at the 79th Locarno Film Festival (The Hollywood Reporter). After Locarno, the film travels to the Toronto International Film Festival's Short Cuts programme. The Hollywood Reporter exclusively debuted the trailer on 5 August.

The film blends documentary and essayistic elements, linking Momand's historic spaceflight to the experience of diaspora, the shadows of colonialism, and the memory of a fractured and silenced nation. The Locarno festival catalogue lists the film under its Pashto title Hershewe Fazanawerd, recorded as a 2026 production in colour, DCP 2K format (Locarno Film Festival).

Ehsas wrote, directed and edited the film. His previous credits include There Will Come Soft Rains, Yellow, and Our Kind of Love. He is also an actor. The production is a collaboration between Afghanistan and the United Kingdom, produced by Lorraine Bhattachary of MonoFilm Productions and by Ehsas through his company Foreigner Films (Variety). Executive producers Catherine Tschaepe and Jack Thomas-O'Brien of Sixteen Films — the production company associated with veteran British director Ken Loach — backed the project (The Hollywood Reporter).

Momand's flight was a joint Soviet-Afghan mission. He launched aboard Soyuz TM-6 and spent nine days on Mir. During that stay, he brewed Afghan tea for his crewmates — a small, human gesture that the film seizes on as a thread connecting a spaceflight to questions of identity, displacement and national memory.

What gives Forgotten Spaceman its pull is the collision at its centre: a Cold War space mission, conducted in an era when Afghanistan and the Soviet Union were bound together, now refracted through the lens of a filmmaker working from exile. The film does not simply recount a historical event. It uses one man's orbit as a way to ask what a country remembers and what it is forced to forget.

For Locarno audiences, the premiere sits in the Pardi di Domani strand, a section dedicated to emerging voices in short and medium-length filmmaking. A Toronto berth in Short Cuts gives the film a second festival platform on a different continent.

The festival circuit, for a short film, is where critical attention and distribution interest begin — buyers and programmers watch these sections closely, and a dual Locarno-Toronto placement puts a title in front of both European and North American audiences before any wider release is considered.