Celebrating 50 years since the Moon landings

Saturday 20 July 2019 marks half a century since humankind first landed on the Moon. The Apollo 11 mission is one of the most unforgettable and inspiring events in human history, and over the years, cinema has flown to Moon on a regular basis, both to explore the incredible true-story of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins' trip to Earth's largest satellite, and to consider tantalising possibility of what future visits might lead to.

The 50th anniversary of the Moon landings offers a perfect opportunity to use film to bring STEAM and other curriculum subjects to life in the classroom - including science, physics, engineering and space. PSHE themes of achievement and overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds are always relevant, and the Apollo 11 mission is the perfect means of engaging young people - as it has done for fifty years now.

You could encourage your students or club members to take a trip to the cinema to see Apollo 11, an astonishing documentary, consisting entirely of archive material and featuring no talking heads or voice-over narration, telling the story of the Moon landing solely via image and sound clips from the period.

Alternatively, there are plenty of other Moon-related films that club leaders can order to inspire and engage young people. From dramatic reenactions charting both the landing itself (First Man) and those that helped make it happen (Hidden Figures), to sci-fi films ranging from one of cinema's most dazzling early pictures (A Trip the Moon) - which imagined what, at the time, seemed like a fantasy trip to the Moon and redefined what cinema could become in the process - to contemporary pictures like Moon, which posits what it might be like to work at a permanent base on the Moon.

Browse below to find films to order your film club, resources to download, and articles to read.

And for more inspiring space content, check out for the time Into Film were honoured to have Tim Peake, the British astronaut living aboard the International Space Station (ISS), judge our space-themed filmmaking competition - picking the winners with a recorded message sent live from space!