Spoof Nazi sci-fi film has festival abuzz

Finnish sci-fi spoof Iron Sky takes viewers on a wild ride to the dark side of the moon, where Nazis who survived the Second World War have built a military base and are planning a "Meteorblitzkrieg" on planet Earth.

Black US astronaut James Washington, on a mission to boost the flagging electoral fortunes of a US president clearly modelled on Sarah Palin, stumbles across the huge Swastika-shaped complex and is captured.

His madcap adventures, set in 2018, see his skin turned white by an Albert Einstein lookalike, send him back to Earth where he is greeted as a lunatic and finally to the moon again to try to save the day, and his skin.

The movie had its official world premiere at the Berlin film festival where it was screened out of competition on Saturday.

Amidst a typically dark and gritty selection of films at this year's festival, Iron Sky has been among the most talked about by the thousands of journalists covering the event.

Producer Tero Kaukomaa said a large part of the funding came from "crowd-sourcing" either on the internet or through selling merchandise to fans.

Director Timo Vuorensola said the original idea for the oddball plotline was born in a Finnish sauna, "as all good things from Finland usually are".

German producer Oliver Damian admitted there had been some resistance within Germany to making a film that made light of the Nazis. "Over the years we needed to organise financing and we had a lot of obstacles to overcome in Germany because a lot of people were very critical of the project," he told reporters after a packed press screening.

"We [younger Germans] have a different past and we are fully aware of this. I think you can make a dark comedy [about Nazis].

"The film is supposed to be fun. This is important. At the end of the day we found funding partners in Germany and the film will be released here in April, so we found people who believed in the project here as well."