Shifting Baselines
Awards
Visions du Réel International Film Festival Nyon (2025) – Nominated: Grand Prix: International Feature Film Competition
Screenings – Jozi
The title of this highly thought-provoking film refers to how each generation perceives the natural environment of their own time as the ‘normal’ baseline, leading to a gradually increased tolerance for environmental degradation. The title might seem a little oblique at first, given that the film is ostensibly about Elon Musk’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, space exploration and rocket launches in general. But as Shifting Baselines begins to knit together its various strands—including the massive impact that the launches have on both the environment and the atmosphere, as well as on the feasibility of future launch missions—everything coheres into a multilayered meditation on the romance and dangers of space travel. Set on the perimeter of the Starbase facility, the filmmaker speaks to people who have come from around the United States to set up camp in the area and bear witness to what some of them view as our first tentative steps towards becoming an intergalactic species.
Guests
Director: Julien Elie
Film Stills
Trailer
Previous Festivals
Hot Docs (2025)
Visions du Réel Int’l FF (Nyon) (2025)
Press Comments
The world’s other great billionaire super-villain, Elon Musk, is the more indirect target of director Julien Elie’s otherworldly, quietly observed film that trains its black-and-white lens on the Texas border town of Boca Chica. This is the location of the SpaceX Starbase, home to the towering metallic rockets that hundreds of new space race obsessives and oglers come to see shot into space in test launches. Taking a cool but inquisitive look at the strange new ecosystem that has emerged around the base and the eccentric cast of characters who are either entranced or horrified by the launches and the effects they have had on the social and environmental makeup of the area, Elie’s film makes a strong case for the argument that Musk and the uberrich class his missions to Mars will ultimately serve are so concerned with leaving earth that they have little regard for what damage they may leave behind.
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