A documentary produced by a 2005 Warsaw Community High School graduate is getting its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Salt Lake City, Utah, Friday.
“We are the opening night film at Sundance Friday,” said Austin Francalancia, producer of “The Mars Generation,” in a telephone interview Monday afternoon.
The governor of Utah will introduce the film, and the whole Sundance film commission is expected to be at the premiere. Over two dozen of the kids in the film will be there. The film will get screened a total of seven times during the internationally known film festival.
“It’s a documentary feature on Space Camp and our journey to Mars seen through the eyes of kids at Space Camp. Some of them want to be engineers, some of them want to be astronauts, or just anything to go to Mars,” said Francalancia.
He said they also worked with NASA and SpaceX on the documentary feature.
“I created the project and sold it to Time Inc. I came up with a director, Michael Barnett. We went to Space Camp USA in Huntsville, Ala., and filmed with 48 teens over a two-week period in August 2015,” he said in explaining his role as the film’s producer.
That gave his production company the base for the story. He said they then moved on to talk to experts, like Bill Nye the Science Guy and Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” on Fox.
Over a period of two years, Francalancia said they interviewed about 125 people for the project. It’s been sold to NetFlix, which will premiere it this spring.
The director, Barnett, is an Emmy Award–winning filmmaker with a history of telling inspiring, inquisitive and captivating stories, according to information at Sundance.org. His first full-length film, the Emmy Award–nominated documentary “Superheroes” – a chronicle of the real-life superhero community – was released by HBO Documentary Films. In 2014, Barnett directed “Becoming Bulletproof,” an intimate story of a group of filmmakers living with disabilities, which premiered on Showtime in spring 2016.
Francalancia said he always wanted to be involved in filmmaking. “My brothers were big movie buffs growing up in Warsaw. We would go to North Pointe Cinemas to see any movie we could,” he recalled.
He studied film at Indiana University in Bloomington. On the day of graduation, he drove by himself to Los Angeles for an internship with Village Roadshow Pictures – producers of movies like “The Matrix” trilogy, the “Sherlock Holmes” franchise and “American Sniper.”
While out there, Francalancia said he also worked for Leonardo DiCaprio and Sony Pictures. The last movie he worked on at Open Road Films was the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight.”
A biography he provided states that Francalancia “is an independent producer and a former film executive of Open Road Films, where he oversaw the acquisition and production of films such as ‘Chef,’ ‘Side Effects,’ ‘Nightcrawler’ and Academy-Award winner ‘Spotlight.’”
Prior to Open Road Films, he worked in physical production and development on HBO’s “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” “Django Unchained” and “The Dark Knight Rises.”
His directorial debut for The Orchard’s “11-8-16,” which covered the 2016 presidential election from the perspective of more than 40 filmmakers, is premiering in 2017, according to his bio.
Francalancia now has his own production company named SERA Films. The company is named after him and his brothers – “S” for Shane, “E” for Eric, “R” for Ryan and “A” for Austin, the youngest of the four.
While NetFlix will debut the documentary in April or May, Francalancia said he is talking to Warsaw Community Schools Superintendent Dr. David Hoffert about doing a screening of it at the high school possibly around March.
Hoffert was Francalancia’s former history teacher. “We are so excited Austin has produced a film that has brought in elements of both STEM education and history,” Hoffert said. “We are very excited to see it premier and we hope a showing can happen in Warsaw to showcase a great documentary and a graduate pursuing his dream.”
Chris Parker Bonifield, Francalancia’s former sixth-grade Leesburg Elementary School teacher, recalled, “As a student, Austin was filled with engagement, energy and insightfulness. It is evident that he has taken these same qualities into his work as an adult.
Austin had a way of keeping things interesting from his great questions in class to his ‘intuitive’ March Madness picks. It has been a joy to follow his career and I am particularly excited to see a future screening of ‘The Mars Generation.’ How incredible for it to premiere at Sundance.”
Francalancia is already working on future projects, and said he always adapts non-fiction stories, anything from World War II to the Cold War. Two of his main projects in development now are on Labor Day and Ethel Rosenberg. He’s hoping to turn those into min-series.
For more information about “The Mars Generation,” visit https://www.sundance.org/projects/the-mars-generation
