Prisoners of the Moon

'Prisoners of the Moon' is a documentary that turns the legendary history of the moon landings upside down. It tells the story of Arthur Rudolph, one of the 100 Nazi V-2 rocket engineers that were secretly brought to America in 1945 to work on the Cold War missile program. Though Rudolph played a key figure in the early days of NASA as well as the space race, he was arrested in Toronto in 1990 under suspicions of being a war criminal and was said to be "100 per cent Nazi" by American reports.

'Prisoners of the Moon' dramatises Arthur Rudolph's trial by using previously unseen transcripts as scripts for lauded Irish actors Jim Norton ('Mary Poppins Returns) as Arthur Rudolph and Cathy Belton ('Philomena') as his lawyer, Barbara Kulaszka. The revealing documentary draws from archive footage, interviews from witnesses, and the testimony of Jean Michel, a slave labour survivor of the subterranean wartime V-2 factory, to offer the audience a picture of this highly controversial point in NASA's history.

This is the story of America's desperation to beat Russia to the moon at all costs, and of the decades-long journey to bring to justice those responsible for the deaths of 20,000 slave laborers in the V-2 rocket factory and concentration camp.

'Prisoners of the Moon' is directed by Johnny Gogan ('The Nuncio and the Writer').