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[Premiere] 'Sundays' Is a Smart Sci-Fi Short Set 50,000 Years in the Future

Amsterdam-based PostPanic is on a mission to revive intelligent sci-fi films.
Images courtesy the artist, via

A version of this article originally appeared on The Creators Project Netherlands. 

“We want to bring back more intelligent, thoughtful sci-fi films, ones that don’t always end up with a Hollywood shoot-out at the end,” director Mischa Rozema told me last year. When I last checked in with his Amsterdam-based production house PostPanic, they were busy working on their debut science fiction film Sundays. Their ambitious plan, fueled by a successful Kickstarter campaign, was to create a short movie that could later be used as a proof-of-concept for a full feature film. Today, we’re proud to give you an exclusive look at that short, above.

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Sundays is a dystopian, philosophical, sci-fi film that is shot entirely in Mexico City. A young man called Ben (Brian Petsos) works for an almighty megacorp called Lennox, that rose to power after a sun flash hit Earth and eradicated all other existing power structures. The story takes place some 50,000 years into the future, an incredibly long time span even for science fiction standards, but one that is crucial to the plot. Rozema ensures:

“We fast-forward 50,000 years into the future, and as a viewer you expect that by this time evolution or technology must have done its thing and changed the world. But the opposite turns out to be true: everything has stayed exactly the same. We see the same people in the same city doing precisely the same jobs. The texture of the world, its smells, its people, its language—everything has stayed the same. Until something goes wrong in the head our of protagonist, a glitch that makes him open his eyes and realize that everything he thought he knew is a lie.”

The next step for PostPanic is to persuade large Hollywood studios to invest in the project in order to turn it into a feature film. “We’re currently in talks with Hollywood on the next steps with Sundays,” says producer Ania Markham. “Things are looking bright.”

Let’s hope we’ll catch some more Sundays in the future.

Read the full interview with director Mischa Rozema here.

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