Director: Pete Middleton
A 1970 moon mission turned survival story gets a fresh, documentary retelling built from the voices and footage of the people who lived through it.
What is Apollo 13: Survival about?
NASA's third crewed lunar attempt was supposed to be routine by the standards of the era, right up until an oxygen tank ruptured roughly 200,000 miles from home. Apollo 13: Survival rebuilds that emergency hour by hour, pulling together archival transmissions, mission-control recordings, and present-day testimony to show how three astronauts and a ground team scrambled to turn a crippled spacecraft into a lifeboat. Rather than dramatizing the crisis with actors, director Pete Middleton leans on the real audio and imagery from 1970, letting the tension of the actual countdown to splashdown carry the film. It's an account of engineering improvisation under pressure as much as it is a space story, built around the people who had to solve an unsolved problem in real time with the world watching.
Cast & crew
The documentary draws on archival material and interviews connected to the mission, and its release brought renewed attention to the era's icons — including Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Gary Sinise, Ed Harris, Kathleen Quinlan, Mary Kate Schellhardt, and Emily Ann Lloyd, names long associated with dramatized tellings of the same crisis.
Context & significance
Directed by Pete Middleton and released in 2024, this UK-produced documentary runs a tight 96 minutes and holds a 7.3 rating on IMDb. Its focus stays squarely on the documentary record of the Apollo 13 emergency rather than fictionalized dialogue, giving it a different texture from earlier feature films covering the same mission.
Where & how to watch
Apollo 13: Survival is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, making the mission-control terminology and real archival audio accessible to Farsi-speaking viewers. You can browse this page freely; watching the documentary itself requires a K-Time login, on a platform built around Persian-language streaming for the diaspora.