Inside “The Council of Stars,” the year’s most expensive sci-fi film

The room is almost completely dark until someone switches on the table. Then a slowly turning galaxy, eight meters across, fills the chamber with blue and violet light, and the circle of empty seats around it suddenly looks like the place where the fate of worlds is decided. This is the council chamber from “The Council of Stars,” the year’s most expensive science-fiction film, and News. was among the few outlets allowed onto the set before it was taken down.

The film, directed by Esther Valkonen and produced by the independent studio Silverkeel Pictures, tells the story of a young envoy summoned to a council of rival star systems on the brink of war. Its reported budget of around 220 million euros makes it the largest production ever shot in the country.

A galaxy you can touch

Instead of filming against green screens, Valkonen insisted on building as much as possible for real. The galaxy table, at the heart of the film’s most important scenes, is a physical object: a glass surface over a grid of thousands of small LEDs, programmed to display moving star fields and planetary maps.

Actors perform differently when the light on their faces is real. When the galaxy shifts, they see it, and the audience sees them seeing it.

Esther Valkonen, director

Production designer Tomas Brandvold and a team of 180 craftspeople built the chamber inside a former shipyard hall in Port Alden, chosen for its enormous height. The curved walls are molded panels painted to look like dark stone, and each of the 24 council seats was hand-carved and fitted with its own lighting.

Costumes for twelve worlds

Costume designer Amara Okonjo and her team made more than 400 costumes, giving each delegation its own materials and colors. Some outfits took a month to complete. “Every planet has its own climate, history and craft traditions, so we invented all of that before cutting the first piece of fabric,” Okonjo said.

Local crews, global ambitions

Around 1,200 people worked on the production, most of them hired locally. The shoot lasted seven months and also used the Greywater mountains and the coastline near Lakeshore for outdoor scenes.

The film is set to premiere at a major international festival next spring before a worldwide release, and a big streaming service has already acquired the rights in several territories.

For the crew, the moment the table lit up for the first time remains the highlight. “Everyone stopped working and just stared at it,” Brandvold said. “That is when we knew it would work on screen.”