Zero Gravity
Work/Short Films/Zero Gravity
When aliens switch off Earth's gravity and send humanity floating into the sky, the survivors fight back with the one weapon the invaders cannot stand: garlic. And Grandma has been ready for seven hundred years.
Behind the story
Why I made it
Zero Gravity began as a screenplay by Tales And I, and what drew me to co-direct it is the straight face with which it treats catastrophe. The world it imagines has spent fifty-seven years preparing for the day gravity switches off, and still forgets to put its bracelets on. The satire lives in that gap between perfect systems and ordinary people, and directing it together means protecting the comedy without losing the fear beneath it.
The world
The film unfolds in Enschede and the farms of Twekkelo in 2276, where seven-hundred-year-old brick squares stand beside glass towers and magnetic roads glow silver across the polder. When colossal bell-shaped ships arrive, people, cars and rivers rise into a glittering shell called the Halo, and the defences are magnetic suits, a national alarm and the garlic the invaders cannot bear. Its look gives the Earth a soft golden backlight and everything that comes from above a cold, sulphur-tinged palette.
The characters
Liv Hoekstra
A nine-year-old on the family farm. She wears her bracelet like everyone is told to, so when the alarm sounds it unfolds into a magnetic suit and she is the one member of the family who is ready.
Jonas Hoekstra
Her father, a farmer. He takes his bracelet off for ten minutes to wash his hands and leaves it charging on the kitchen windowsill, and those ten minutes are exactly when the sky opens.
Oma Griet
The grandmother of Twekkelo. Eighty-four, knitting in magnetic slippers beneath braids of garlic, she meets the invasion with the calm of someone who has seen it before: they always come on a Tuesday.
From the production bible
Credits
Registered works
Every film, series and book on this site is a registered work and the exclusive property of Jeff Zambrano. Stories, characters, titles, scripts and images may not be copied, adapted or used to train any system without written permission. Copies and derivative works are traced automatically, and any infringement will be pursued under the laws of the country where it originates.
