InterZone Cancels Filming Due To Pandemic

Windcraft Racing’s plans upended by spread of virus

GREYSTONES, Ireland, 30 April 2020 — We at InterZone Pictures are extremely disappointed to announce that all filming on our current projects is now cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic that has ravaged the world since appearing in China last December.

The main project we had planned to film this year was in collaboration with Windcraft Racing, but almost all of the events that Windcraft had intended to compete in have already been cancelled. The only one with any chance of taking place is a speed record attempt, due to coincide with the Monaco Yacht Show in September.

The Windcraft Racing team had created a comprehensive programme for 2020, starting with a speed record attempt next month during the Cannes International Film Festival, now postponed and unlikely to take place this year.

More significantly, Windcraft’s Wild Eleven 38-foot Cigarette Hawk was scheduled to compete in a major boating event in Ireland in July, Cork300. InterZone Pictures had been arranging for a comprehensive shoot, but with Cork300 cancelled by the organisers, all the major events of the season were now off the agenda and we in turn decided to cancel all activity until the pandemic is at last under control, whenever that may be.

Wild Eleven powering across the bay at Poole
Wild Eleven racing off Guernsey in 2019

Oldest yacht club staged first ever powerboat race

Cork300, running over a full month of events, was to celebrate 300 years of the oldest yacht club in the world, the Royal Cork Yacht Club, which hosts the biannual Cork Week, one of the most challenging and popular events of the world sailing calendar.

But the RCYC is not just the oldest yacht club — it also organised and hosted the first-ever offshore powerboat race, back in the year 1903, and had included in the month-long series of events and celebrations a Powerboat Festival to recall that famous occasion.

Wild Eleven was to have competed in the Union Internationale Motonautique Offshore Marathon World Championship and the Cork-Fastnet-Cork UIM Long Distance race, a challenging, 200 kilometre-plus route from Cobh to the Fastnet Rock, set in the Atlantic Ocean, and back; and also the UIM’s World Record Offshore Long Distance Record, competing for the FPT All-Black Challenge Trophy.

However, all those events and more have been cancelled for this year. They were organised by Powerboat NI, since April 2019 the Irish authority for all Ireland as designated by the UIM.

As the Cork events were the major events on Team Windcraft’s agenda for 2020, and given that the Cannes event had become impossible, we at InterZone also decided to cancel all filming of Windcraft races or speed record attempts this year.

According to Jerome Brarda, who as well as being the driver is also chef d’equipe for Windcraft, the team may yet attempt the final event on its calendar this year, a speed record attempt from Monte Carlo to St Tropez, due for 25 September next. But this also depends on external factors, especially whether the organisers of the Monaco Yacht Show are able to proceed with that event, which takes place annually at the end of September. At present, they still believe they may go ahead.

In any case, InterZone has concluded that to film just one event out of the five planned would not be a viable option or use of our resources, and we have thus decided to postpone all filming until 2021.

We know that the RCYC plans to re-schedule its Cork300 festival, and we hope it will be possible for it to go ahead next year. If it does, Team Windcraft and our film crews will be there, and at all other Windcraft events, to get some top-class footage for our documentary series.

In the meantime, we have also begun to work on planning another documentary that we hope to begin filming in 2021, the first in a fly-on-the-wall series following the lives of stars in their fields, whether sports, music, or screen — even science and cutting edge research.