German-based Finnish director Hannu Salonen has begun shooting Adam’s Eight (Adams Acht), a sports drama about one of the most remarkable moments in Olympic history. The film tells the true story of Karl Adam, a gym teacher from a small town who reinvented himself as the “rowing professor” and who, together with his young, eight-man crew of complete outsiders, achieved an unexpected triumph by winning gold at the 1960 Rome Olympics.

The story begins in post-war Schleswig-Holstein, in the small town of Ratzeburg, right on the border with East Germany, where rowing was still regarded as an elitist sport dominated by conservative structures. Adam, a gym teacher with no professional rowing background, introduced radical training methods and technical innovations that were initially met with scepticism. At the heart of the drama is rower Hans Lenk, torn between his sporting career in the West and his love for Ulla, who lives across the border in the GDR on the other side of Lake Ratzeburg. As Adam struggles with his own past and faces resistance from those unwilling to embrace change, the team must contend with personal rivalries, ideological divides and the weight of Cold War tensions. By pushing beyond their physical and emotional limits, Adam gradually forges his young crew into an exceptional unit. Against all odds, they rise from obscurity to achieve one of the greatest outsider triumphs in German sporting history.

The cast is led by Oliver Masucci (The Royal Game [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Edward Berger
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The script is co-written by Domenik Pockberger and Stephan Falk. Adam’s Eight marks Salonen’s next feature after Vares – The Sheriff [+leggi anche:
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Adam’s Eight is being produced by Ivo-Alexander Beck for Berlin-based Ninety-Minute Film, in co-production with Adams Acht, René Frotscher for Sunday Filmproduktion, and Majestic Filmproduktion. The project is backed by MOIN Filmförderung, the German Federal Film Fund (DFFF), the German Federal Film Board (FFA) and the Slovak Audiovisual Fund (AVF). Majestic Filmverleih is set to release the film in German cinemas on 10 September 2026.