Heil in the sky

Published: 12:00am, 14 Jun 2009

Quentin Tarantino's latest film Inglourious Basterds is hardly the only one spoofing the Nazis these days. A group of Finnish geeks who released their first feature for free on the internet just a few years ago was also at Cannes last month. They were looking for second-round financing for their latest project, Iron Sky, a sci-fi parody with one of the coolest tag lines ever: 'In 1945 the Nazis fled to the moon. In 2018 they are coming back.'

Now, this is hardly the tale of someone putting something clever online and it snowballing. This is the serious business of a couple of guys who have gone from making a film with home computers to shopping a movie around at the world's premier market for indie cinema.

Producer Samuli Torssonen and director Timo Vuorensola started out in the early 1990s with the Star Wreck series of animated short films, all Trekkie parodies. By 1998, the duo had embarked on a 103-minute parody that would take them seven years and hundreds of helpful friends to finish: Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning. Although its story and jokes were perhaps worthy of high school theatre, the 3D animation was on a par with recent Star Wars films and the space battles were even cooler.

Completely freed from story logic and an all-ages marketing mentality, they were able to totally geek out and explode massive starships in the gnarliest ways imaginable.

In the Pirkinning premiered in August 2005, and with no real marketing plan, Torssonen and Vuorensola released the film as a free download from October 1 that year. More than 3 million downloads followed within two months, according to the film's website, and local press had dubbed it the 'most watched Finnish film ever'. DVDs are now in stores throughout Scandinavia and a US release is expected in the autumn.

Star Wreck's success raised Iron Sky to a different level. First, name actors and a real writer are on board. The lead moon Nazi, a suave boot-clicker who dreams of becoming Fuhrer of the Fourth Reich, is played by German Goetz Otto, who has already done SS gravitas in Schindler's List and Downfall. Also enlisted is Julie Dietze as a Nazi girl, and an experienced writer, Finnish sci-fi novelist Johanna Sinisalo.

The teaser for Iron Sky (www.ironsky.net) outlines an absurd story. At the end of the second world war, Nazis escape the Allies by blasting off in spacecraft from Antarctica. They set up a base on the dark side of the moon, from where they plan a counter attack. Throw in some Nazi moon motorcycles with sidecars and spacemen giving Nazi salutes, and the potential sounds even more Tarantino than Tarantino's latest film, which has been scoffed at by critics as a pointless Jewish revenge fantasy that could only have been born in Hollywood boardrooms.

Maybe it'll take these goofy Finns to ride the fine line of making the Nazis funny.

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