First Images From Juan Solanas' UPSIDE DOWN

Juan Solanas first leapt on to my radar a few years back with his dazzling short film The Man Without A Head, a Jeunet-style visual effort built around the romantic desires of a man quite literally without a head. With that short film Solanas announced himself as something unique, a director who fuses high concept science fiction with deeply human stories.

And then for his first feature he did something totally different.

But now he's back where he belongs with Upside Down, a high concept science fiction romance starring Jim Sturgess and Kirsten Dunst.

Look up towards the sky and rub your eyes because you won't believe what you see: cities, forests, and oceans with their own inverted gravity, only an arm's length away, yet completely unreachable. Take a leap over to this alternate reality, two worlds - one above, one below‐ facing each other, and you'll land in the extraordinary world of Upside Down, the new ground‐breaking film of Juan Solanas, the director of the innovative Cannes and César‐prized short film The Man Without A Head and heartbreaking 2005 Cannes film Nordeste.

Adam is a seemingly ordinary guy in a very extraordinary universe. He lives humbly trying to make ends meet, but his romantic spirit holds on to the memory of a girl he met once upon a time from another world, an inverted affluent world with its own gravity, directly above but beyond reach... a girl named Eve. Their childhood flirtation becomes an impossible love. But when he catches a glimpse of grown‐up Eve on television, nothing will get in the way of getting her back... Not even the law or science!

Yes, it is essentially a Romeo and Juliet story with the separated lovers kept apart by entirely different worlds, one of which hovers inverted above the other. It's an enormously complex production - one that features a whopping FORTY NINE different production and funding bodies listed as involved on the IMDB - with the production designer and art director boasting credits on Watchmen, Minority Report, Fight Club, Dark City and The Matrix. The first images have just arrived online and you can find them in the gallery below.