Lost moon landing documentary unveiled
Updated on 16 July 2009
A film documenting the Apollo 11 space mission is finally released as NASA celebrate 40 years since the first man landed on the moon.
It lay under a desk for years gathering dust - a documentary film commissioned by NASA to celebrate the Apollo 11 space mission when man first landed on the moon.
Finally, it will be seen by the public. Moonwalk One was made in 1969, and has been re-mastered to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.
'At the National Film Theatre in London this morning we witnessed the arrival of two large film cans; the kind of cans you rarely see,' reports Nicholas Glass, 'They date from the early 1970s and contain a film that many people thought was lost: about the Apollo Space Programme.'
The film's director Theo Kamecke describes how he approached making the film to arts correspondent Nicholas Glass. When asked how he felt about the fact the film had never been seen, he said: 'I wasn't surprised at all.'
'The printing elements for the film itself disappeared... maybe they had been misplaced by Nasa, nobody could ever find it, so they were incapable of reprinting the film.
'It turned out the only copy of the full film on 35mm was the copy that I'd kept, and it was sitting under my desk.
'And I knew this, but nobody asked me about it because nobody was interested until quite recently until enough time had gone by that interest was rekindled.'
