BURIED inside the headline-grabbing tragedies people associate with Afghanistan is a jaw-dropper: the country sent a man to space in 1988.

That’s the central, startling fact London-based actor-director Elham Ehsas wants firmly back in public memory as he prepares to premiere his film Forgotten Spaceman at Locarno. And he’s not pitching it as trivia. He’s pitching it as proof of a “buried” history of achievement that rarely gets airtime.

The project is a documentary — and, crucially, an accidental one. Ehsas has described it that way while discussing the film ahead of its festival bow, suggesting a journey that wasn’t neatly planned from the outset but grew into something bigger and more personal.

Personal, because the story comes with a startling family connection. Ehsas has flagged that link as part of the film’s pull, positioning the Afghan cosmonaut story not just as a national milestone, but as something that reaches into his own life.

Locarno, with its reputation for spotlighting distinctive, director-driven work, is an apt launchpad for a film like this: a title that sounds almost like a corrective. Forgotten Spaceman doesn’t merely point up an overlooked chapter — it argues that the forgetting itself is part of the drama.

What makes the premise so instantly compelling is the collision of scale. Space travel is the ultimate flex of modern ambition, yet here it’s tethered to a country whose global image is so often reduced to conflict. Ehsas is betting that contrast will land: not as a gotcha, but as an invitation to expand the frame.

If Forgotten Spaceman hits the way its set-up suggests, it won’t just be about one mission in 1988. It’ll be about the stories that survive, the ones that vanish, and the complicated power of reclaiming a national achievement through one filmmaker’s intensely close-to-home lens.