Upstreamers

by Felix van Kann
Feature Screenplay

When 30-year-old professional tennis player Alex is threatened with losing his scholarship at his academy, his once promising career faces a sudden end. In his despair and obsession with succeeding in the sport he loves he turns to what he sees as his last option to turn his fate around: doping.

Felix van Kann is a German screenwriter who holds an MFA from Columbia University. He was a participant in Impact x Netflix DACH’s prestigious 2022 Accelerator Program for German-language writers during which he sold and developed the sports drama series Fanatics for Netflix. In 2021, Felix received a Sloan Screenplay Grant for his feature screenplay Upstreamers about doping in professional tennis. The project has also been developed in the Film Independent Producing Lab where it was awarded a Sloan Production Grant. Felix‘ pilot Legends of Local League was one of four finalists for the Humanitas Student Comedy Fellowship in 2021 and his documentary Die Adler von 1960 (The Eagles of 1960) received both a development and a production fund respectively from HessenFilm und Medien in Germany the same year. At Columbia, Felix taught undergraduate students as a Screenwriting Teaching Fellow and he was recently selected for the 2022 cohort of the prestigious BAFTA Newcomers Program. Felix is drawn to comedies and dramas with an often absurd and darkly comedic tone, exploring themes such as irrational obsessions, fragile masculinity, and boyhood, often inspired by his experiences as a professional tennis player. He lives in Los Angeles.