Femke Wolting has revealed further details of her galactic plans. Co-founder and managing-director of Amsterdam and LA-based film and trans media outfit Submarine, she is one of the producers on Richard Linklater’s new project, Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Adventure, described as a hybrid of live action in a fully animated world.
Oscar-nominee Linklater is also producing alongside Tommy Pallotta, Bruno Felix and cinema polymath Mike Blizzard.
The film is set against the backdrop of the 1969 Apollo mission to the moon, which launched 51 years ago and is inspired by Linklater’s own childhood in Houston, Texas. It is expected to land on Netflix in 2021.
“It’s the same technique as [Linklater’s] A Scanner Darkly. It is first filmed live action and then traced. We did a [live action] shoot in February/March in Austin and now at Submarine we are doing all the animation,” Wolting explained.
Apollo 10 1/2 is just one of many projects that Submarine is currently hatching. Speaking to Business Doc Europe in a break between back-to-back IDFA Forum meetings, Wolting revealed details of some of the new Submarine docs that will soon be surfacing.
Submarine is already part of one Forum project, Draw For Change!, the doc series about female cartoonists sold by Autlook.
Last week, Wolting was pitching IDFA Forum selection Survival Of The Richest (aka Exponential). Directed by Andreas Dalsgaard and produced by Submarine alongside Pumpernickel Films, this a feature and series which looks at big tech and the distortion of the original utopian dream of the online era. Now, surveillance, extraction and control are the watchwords. The story is told by “cyberpunk legend,” Douglas Rushkoff, a cultural theorist who knows the tech world from the inside. The project is being put together both as a three-part series and a feature film.
“ARTE Germany is in and we are speaking now with a bunch of streamers and broadcasters,” Wolting said of the project, expected to go into production early next year.
Production is about to get underway on another Submarine feature doc project, Journey To The Northern Lights. This tells the story of how, in March 2013, eight young people began a maritime adventure, sailing away from Rotterdam on an improvised sailing boat, the Warnow, on a trip from Schiedam to Norway. After rescue by the coastguard off the coast of England, five disembarked from the Warnow while the other three decided to continue on. These three were never heard from again.
Directed by Dutch director Wim van der Aar, the film is backed by, among others, the Netherlands Film Fund and the NPO. The doc will include footage shot by the young sailors themselves. “The boat was never found but they [the group that stayed behind] are all participating. They filmed a lot of their joinery and the building of the ship,” Wolting explained.
Other Submarine projects include feature doc The Art of Stealing and an animated documentary Baghdad Zoo, on which Submarine is partnering with UK producer Susanna Price and which tells the story of how animals in a Baghdad zoo were saved by soldiers on both sides during the Iraqi war.
Meanwhile, the company is now moving ahead on its previously announced XTC: A Biography, which explores the economic and cultural impact of the synthetic drugs business on the Netherlands. This is based on the book XTC: A Biography by Philippus Zandstra and Wietse Pottjewijd, which is just about to be published in the Netherlands.
From being tolerated as an illegal love drug to its use in combating pain and depression to it being regarded as a source of income for serious organised crime, the influence of Ecstasy is felt across every part of the Netherlands. As the doc will reveal, it has given Holland an image as a narco state, and has led to cold-blooded killings in the criminal underworld.
