HAPPENING 13 JULY 2026 | Rotterdam-based filmmaker and visual artist Tess Martin will release her experimental documentary 1976: Search for Life online on Monday 13 July. The short film connects NASA’s historic Viking 1 mission to Mars with her father’s journey to Scotland in search of his family roots.
Image: Still from 1976: Search for Life, an experimental documentary by Rotterdam-based artist Tess Martin combining family 8mm footage, replacement animation and NASA archive material.
Completed in 2023, the film brings space exploration and family history into the same orbit. One journey looks across millions of kilometres towards another planet, while the other looks backwards through generations, photographs and memories in search of a family past that can never be recovered completely.
Mars meets family memory
On 20 July 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 lander touched down on Mars and returned the first photograph taken from the planet’s surface. The mission was designed to photograph and study Mars, analyse its atmosphere and soil, and search for evidence that life might exist there.
During that same summer, Martin’s father Stephen travelled to Scotland with his wife and baby. A science-fiction enthusiast, he visited the hometown of his mother and documented the journey in a travel journal while following news of the Viking mission.
1976: Search for Life weaves three journeys together: Viking’s search across space, Stephen Martin’s search for his heritage and the filmmaker’s own attempt to understand her father at an earlier point in his life. Excerpts from his journal are read by Martin herself, making the film both an investigation and an intimate conversation across time.
Archival footage of astronomer Carl Sagan provides an emotional link between the two searches. His observation that “as your perspective broadens you learn more about what you left at home, as well as what you went out to seek” gives the film a way to connect Mars, Scotland and family memory without forcing them into one simple answer.
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Animation folds different times together
Martin combines NASA archive material with digitised family 8mm footage and replacement animation, a frame-by-frame technique in which one image is repeatedly replaced and photographed. She returned to locations in Scotland connected with the 1976 trip and re-photographed selected family images within the present-day landscape.
The result places several versions of time inside the same frame. Old footage moves inside photographs held by the filmmaker’s hand, while contemporary Scotland remains visible around it. The past is present, but it cannot quite be entered. Time travel, sadly, remains emotionally possible and technically uncooperative.
The film also shows traces of its own construction. Hands, photographs, screens and recreated Martian landscapes remain visible, making Martin’s attempt to reach the past part of the story rather than something hidden behind the finished images.
“Can you ever really know your parents?” Martin asks in her director’s statement. The film does not offer a neat answer. Instead, it treats that search as something close to travelling into space: difficult, improbable and still worth attempting.
Check out the trailer:
Rotterdam film travels internationally
Martin is based in Rotterdam and works across animation, film, installation and expanded cinema. Her practice often examines memory, identity, belonging and the way people understand the past through incomplete images and personal records.
1976: Search for Life was filmed in Rotterdam and in Midlothian and Aberdeenshire in Scotland. The production was supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and the City of Rotterdam, with Mars cinematography and audiovisual post-production by Matija Pekić, animation assistance by Marike Verbiest and title design by Alice Saey.
The film had its world premiere in the International Competition Animated Film at DOK Leipzig in October 2023. Martin was also selected as the festival’s Animation Special Guest, with a retrospective and masterclass placing the new work within her wider artistic practice.
Since then, the film has appeared at more than twenty international festivals and screenings, including Animafest Zagreb, Rencontres Internationales Traverse, Proyector Moving Image Festival and Science New Wave. Its festival journey now gives way to a wider online audience, fifty years after the family trip and Viking mission at the centre of its story.
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Watch the film online
1976: Search for Life will be available online from Monday 13 July through Zippy Frames, an online journal focused on European and independent animation.
The experimental documentary runs for 10 minutes and 54 seconds. It is in English, with English and Dutch subtitles available. Further information about the film and Martin’s work can be found at her official website.
