Hamburg-based producer Sebastian Weyland of Heimathafen Film & Medien is reuniting with Lithuanian filmmaker Tomas Vengris for The True Story Of Earth And Sky which is being pitched to potential partners at the European Genre Forum at the Black Nights International Film Festival in Tallinn this week.
The English-language project is in early development. Described as “a lyrical allegory set in the not-too-distant future”, The True Story Of Earth And Sky centres on a low-level server technician for a power hub who can’t help but think that there is more to life than the unchanging routine dictated by a highly advanced AI system of a strict global paramilitary government.
Weyland and Vengris first worked together on the director’s debut feature Motherland which was presented at Tallinn’s Baltic Event co-production market in 2015 and subsequently had its world premiere in Busan in 2019.
International slate
Weyland and his new partner Manfred Giesecke in Heimathafen Film are putting together a slate of internationally focused features and series. The company is the German minority co-producer on Estonian filmmaker Liina Triskina-Vanhatalo’s Lioness which was presented at last year’s Baltic Event by producer Ivo Felt of Allfilm where it won the best project award.
The thriller about extreme parent-child relationships has also attracted Latvia’s Ego Media onboard as a third production partner. Hamburg fund MOIN is backing the project.
“We are in the last stages of casting and the film will be shot at locations in Estonia and Lithuania next spring,” said Weyland.
Heimathafen also has two documentaries in post-production: Sven Halfar’s Heaven Can Wait, a portrait of the Hamburg-based choir of the same name whose members are all over 70, and Franco-Israeli filmmaker Sharon Ryba-Kahn’s Love Till 120 about life and love for three female Holocaust survivors,
It is also a minority co-producer for the Dutch company OAK Motion on its feelgood road movie When Fucking Spring Is In The Air by the Japanese-Polish director Danyael Sugawara, which completed post-production last month and is now looking to have its world premiere at an international festival early next year.
The development slate includes two literary adaptations with German director Marc Brummund attached. They are Die Grosse Freiheit (working title) based on Rocko Schamoni’s bestseller set in the Hamburg of the early 1960s and Michael Wallner’s Second World War drama April In Paris.
There is also the English-language drama The Sequel with a screenplay by Christian Kaps, one of the participants of this year’s Netflix Impact Lab, and the crime thriller TV mini-series Das Ende der Gewalt written by Petra Lüschow and Hannes Held.
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