Rose Noelle TV production includes Tutukaka location shoot

The case of the Rose Noelle is subject to a movie being filmed in Tutukaka.

A two-hour dramatisation that received $2.6 million in taxpayer funding and tells the story of the Rose Noelle is being partly filmed in Whangarei, with the production company looking for extras for the shoot.

Auckland production company Making Movies received the funding from NZ on Air last year to make the dramatised production.

To be called Abandoned, it's believed to be centred at Orama Oasis, Karaka Bay, at the north end of Great Barrier, with additional filming at Tutukaka.

The producers were casting for extras in the Tutukaka area recently. On its website makingmovies.co.nz the company says: "With little more than hope and each other, four sailors are trapped in their upside down yacht."

The programme will look at the case of the Rose Noelle that made international headlines in 1989, an intriguing story of a trimaran, which went missing and drifted for 119 days before smashing onto rocks at Great Barrier Island. It will tell the story of the crew's survival, the NZ on Air website says.

The 6.5-tonne trimaran Rose Noelle washed ashore at the southeastern tip of Great Barrier in September 1989 after turning turtle during a stormy voyage to Tonga. After drifting about 3000km, it washed on to a reef off Little Waterfall Bay. After four months in the upturned vessel, skipper John Glennie and crew members Jim Nalepka, Phillip Hofman and Rick Hellreigel were skin and bone. They had huddled together in part of a flooded cabin, an area about equal to a queen-size bed.

The men cut a hole in the hull, caught rainwater and lived off stores, plus fish which swam into the craft. Unusual winds and currents drove the boat back toward New Zealand rather than, as expected, toward the South American Coast.

Many people were sceptical about the story, but scientific examination of marine growth on the Rose Noelle's hull confirmed it.

The adventure inspired two books, a New Zealand stage production called Flipside and a television documentary.

Abandoned will screen on TV One, produced by James Heyward, whose previous work includes Shackleton's Captain.