Annual Top Films Lists

Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2021: #57. Joe Penna’s Stowaway

Published on January 5, 2021

Stowaway

Brazilian born musician/director Joe Penna continues with interesting co-production packaging for his sophomore feature Stowaway, a US-German project starring Toni Collette, Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim and Shamier Anderson. The title is produced by Jonas Katzenstein, Maximilian Leo, Clay Pecorin, Ulrich Schwarz, Nick Spicer and Adam Tertzakian across XYZ Films, Augenschein Filmproduktion, Rise Pictures and RainMaker Films. Composer Volker Bertelmann (Lion, 2016) will provide the score. Penna’s directorial debut, the Mads Mikkelsen headlined Arctic, played at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival as a Midnight selection. We originally pegged the title as a 2020 release, but now this is in the hands of Netflix who landed the rights in December.

Gist: Penna, co-writing with Arctic’s Ryan Morrison (also serving as editor), scripts a compromised mission to Mars when a discovered stowaway causes severe damage to a spaceship’s life support systems. A medical researcher (Kendrick) opposes the opinion of both the ship’s commanding officer (Collette) and the biologist (Kim) as they navigate dwindling resources.

Release Date/Prediction: Principal photography began in June 2019 in Munich and Cologne. With Netflix landing the rights, it’s entirely possible that the world premiere is pushed until safe public festival TIFF edition in the fall.

Nicholas Bell

Los Angeles based Nicholas Bell is IONCINEMA.com's Chief Film Critic and covers film festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and TIFF. He is part of the critic groups on Rotten Tomatoes, The Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and GALECA. His top 3 for 2021: France (Bruno Dumont), Passing (Rebecca Hall) and Nightmare Alley (Guillermo Del Toro). He was a jury member at the 2019 Cleveland International Film Festival.