Moscow: A Russian film director and an actress returned to Earth on Sunday after completing the shooting scenes for12 days of their first movie in orbit on the International Space Station (ISS).

According to the Russian Space agency broadcasting footage the actress and director of the movie Yulia Peresild and actor Klim Shipenko landed as scheduled on Kazakhstan’s steppe at 04:36 GMT. They were ferried back to terra firma by cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who had been on the space station for the past six months.

Touchdown after 191 days in space for @Novitskiy_ISS and 12 days in space for two Russian filmmakers! More… https://t.co/CrQl3O1BUl pic.twitter.com/kzXlCTr0og

— International Space Station (@Space_Station) October 17, 2021

Russian space agency Roscosmos in a tweet said that the descent vehicle of the crewed spacecraft Soyuz MS-18 is standing upright and is secure. The crews are feeling good! The filmmakers had blasted off from the Russia leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan earlier this month, travelling to the ISS with veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov to film scenes for The Challenge.

If the project stays on track, the Russian crew will beat a Hollywood project announced last year by “Mission Impossible” star Tom Cruise together with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The movie’s plot, which has been mostly kept under wraps along with its budget, centres on a surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut.