The Hobbit and Sherlock star, takes the lead in a new Australian film Cargo, which is based on a 2013 Tropfest short film.
From the producer of The Babadook, Cargo is based on the viral short film, which is the story of a man and his infant daughter who are stranded in the middle of a zombie apocalypse in rural Australia. And when he becomes infected, the countdown begins for him to find her protection before he changes forever.
At its core, Cargo is a dual father/daughter love story, which happens to unfold against the backdrop of a deadly outbreak. The film explores two parallel tales of familial devotion: an infected man’s mission to seek a new home for his infant daughter and a young Indigenous girl’s quest to save the soul of her infected dad.
The film initially started out as a 7-minute Tropfest short film (of the same name) that struck a chord with its audience. In fact, since becoming a Tropfest finalist in 2013, Cargo has garnered over 13 million YouTube views. It was not long before Yolanda and Ben had signed with American powerhouse agents CAA, who were interested in their next venture.
As Howling put it “we thought there was a lot of untapped terrain in CARGO” and after an intense 4-week period of brainstorming, the two had a treatment to shop around on a whirlwind trip to the US. Within a couple of weeks, producers Russell Ackerman and John Schoenfelder of Addictive Pictures had picked up the project and upon returning to Australia, Yolanda began work on the feature-length script.
“Going from a seven-minute short film to a 100-minute feature film, there’s a big difference there in terms of material” says director Yolanda Ramke. “You need to start thinking more deeply about things that you want to be tapping into, and expanding the world of the film, and you have to get a lot more detailed and introduce new characters and new layers to the story.”
Directed by Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling, and written by Ramke. The film stars Martin Freeman (The Hobbit), Anthony Hayes (War Machine), Susie Porter (Puberty Blues), Caren Pistorius (Offspring), and Kris McQuade (The Kettering Incident).
Cargo hits Netflix today on May 18th.
