Low Flying Aircraft

Swedish Director Solveig Nordlund added another J.G. Ballard adaption to the small number of Ballard-films in 2002. It took her 15 years to let her vision of a film version of "Low Flying Aircraft" become a reality. With the help of a Swedish-Portugese co-production deal, filmed in Portuegese it became "Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude"
Set in a perfectly fitting location in an abandoned holiday-resort on the Portugese coast, the seldom seen feature lengths film takes Ballards story on a different, yet very fitting route.


The eerie Ballard distopia tells a story of an empty world that suffers under massive numbers of deformed child births. What sounds like a standard sci-fi sujet ("Children of Men" almost stopped there) is turned on its head by Ballard revealing the disturbing truth about the mutated children.

Nordlund decided to shift the focus of the story on the pregnant female lead Judith Forester (played by hauntingly strong and beautiful Margarida Marinho), who is determined to give birth to her baby, no matter what the outcome might be.

"Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude" is currently shown at various festivals. The film has a fantastic setting and amazing production values, despite its relatively small budget. Shot in Portugese and only available locally without subtitles on DVD, it is deemed to remain relatively obscure.

The ever brilliant folks at Ballardian have conducted an interesting interview with Solveig Nordlund recently and wrote a nice write-up of her work. They also extracted three 10-minute excerpts of "Low Flying Aircraft" of which I posted the second part here.

Parts one and three are available here and here. Recommended!