Alice Cespi begins to see her life fall apart due to strange memories from childhood when she was forced to watch a film called "Footprints on the Moon" involving an unethical experiment in leaving astronauts stranded on the moon's surface. Alice has terrible dreams and begins to become addicted to tranquillizers. The drugs and her deteriorating mental condition cause her to miss work and she is eventually fired, whereupon she travels to a dilapidated former tourist area called Garma after receiving a mysterious postcard. There, she runs into a girl named Paula Burton, who tells her that she looks exactly like another woman, Nicole, currently staying at the faded resort. Alice then encounters a series of strange people and circumstances, all leading her closer to unlocking the possibly deadly mystery.
The films script was allegedly based on Las Huellas by Italian-Argentinian writer Mario Fenelli. He was close friends with Manuel Puig with the two writing scripts together while Puig encouraged Fenelli to become a fiction writer instead of a film-maker. The film was shot in nine weeks between Rome and Turkey starting in 29 April 1974. Florinda Bolkan spoke on her performance in the film stating that she was immersed into it psychologically and physically stating she lost eleven pounds while working on it. the film was director Luigi Bazzoni's final film.
Release
Footprints on the Moon was distributed by Cineriz in Italy as Le orme on 1 February 1975. The film grossed a total of 202,505,676 Italian lire domestically.
Reception
On its initial release, critic Giovanni Grazzini wrote that "following Dario Argento's exploits, Italian cinema can count on another director who knows how to make a thriller...The movie nails you to the chair, keeps you awake, sows in doubt and curiosity, and eventually does not make you regret the time and money spent." Francesco Barilli saw the film in 2011 and referred to it as an "intriguing, elegant, suggestive film, very courageous and peculiar, very well shot and with a beautiful photography by Vittorio Storaro"
