A man returns to the Midwestern farm of his childhood on a desperate mission to unearth the horrifying truth of what landed there in the summer of 1960.

We’ve been eyeing this film for a while since we featured the trailer almost 8 months ago, we also saw the film at the Montreal Fantasia Festival and had the amazing opportunity to meet up with its director who flew in from Australia, Josh Tanner. ‘The Landing’ blew us away with its mixture of styles and accurate era depictions, but after meeting with Josh the element that surprised us the most, is that the entire American farmland was filmed in Australia.

Intitially daunted by the challenge of making this film in Australia, we were fortunate to re purpose the barn from Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, an iconic visual slice of architectural Americana which gave us an great head start. From there a combination of set builds and VFX got us across the finish line.

Besides the film’s spectacular visual esthetics, the story simply unearths itself and completely bewilders us from all expectations. The film runs at 18 minutes, but never are we set back against unimportant elements making us look at our watches. ‘The Landing’ submerges us in the specular and mysterious UFO sightings from the 1960’s, but this was a sighting like no other.

The story started for me with the image of a UFO being physically unearthed in a barren field. The concept of the suppression and disclosure of a visitor from space by not the usual government types, but the hands of a simple farmer and his son excited me and we ran with it.

The film was extremely ambitious and we believe Josh and his crew clearly set off their goals with this cinematic wonder.

The main goal for the short, besides the obvious wanting to tell our story in the best possible way, was definitely to break down geographical borders and promote ourselves as resourceful filmmakers who could, should the material call for it, make films in Australia that weren’t necessarily Australian stories.

We are also developing a feature film adaptation of The Landing, so we wanted to make sure it had a broad scope and pace that felt more like a feature than a short. We’ve had some great success with the film, screening at 50+ festivals, winning 10 best film awards and qualifying it for the Academy Awards.

thelandingfilm.com
facebook.com/thelandingQPIXFILM
imdb.com/title/tt2831474