Deaf Crocodile Films has announced that the rarely-seen Romanian sci-fi film The Son of the Stars is getting a North American 4K restoration. The company is partnering with the Romanian National Film Archive and the Romanian Film Centre to create the restoration from the original 35mm negative and sound elements. Deaf Crocodile’s Craig Rogers oversees the project.
A sequel to Delta Space Mission, The Son of the Stars is set in the year 6470. It follows a husband and wife team of explorers who receive a distress signal from an astronaut who disappeared years earlier. So, they set out to find her but hit trouble when they crash-land on a bizarre planet. The film comes from animators and co-directors Călin Cazan and the late Mircea Toia.
About the film, and working with Toia, Cazan said:
“The discussion about doing another film started at the end of the production of the ‘Delta Space Mission‘ movie. Any director, even in short films, when they get into post-production (editing, mixing), starts thinking about the next project. We had a team behind us that depended on us. Mircea was an inventor. In the script, I was pretty much on the same level. But in mastering the image, the frame, he was better. And as a friend, he was very patient with me — he was about fifteen years older and I was at the beginning of my career.”
About the restoration, Deaf Crocodile Co-Founder and Head of Acquisitions & Distribution, Dennis Bartok, said:
“We had such a wonderful time working with Călin on the release of ‘Delta Space Mission.’ And then we discovered that he and Mircea Toia had directed another feature right after, just as surreal and psychedelic — and if anything, even more criminally unknown here in the U.S. Their ingenuity, working behind the Iron Curtain in the mid-1980s, incorporating elements of Western sci-fi and Japanese anime with Eastern European music and mythology and even politics, was just astonishing. I just wish they’d been able to make a dozen more features — but we’re incredibly proud that we’ve been able to restore their two animated features together, ‘The Son of the Stars‘ and ‘Delta Space Mission.'”
The Son of the Stars special edition Blu-ray will release in early 2023. Watch the teaser trailer below:
