OLD HEART A new movie adapted from Peter Ferry’s acclaimed novel — Coming Spring 2025
Cast & Crew
More information to follow about our amazing cast and crew, drawn from the Mid West and check back for details about the locations we’re shooting in.
The play
“Thoroughly enjoyed the play. Melanie Lamrock was outstanding.”
—Peter Bhatia, Editor-in-chief, Detroit Free Press.
Old Heart, directed by Kirk Wahamaki and Lesley Witt is on stage at Muskegon Community College’s Overbrook Theater May 20 (7 p.m.) and May 21, 2023 (2 p.m.) The play premiered at Detroit’s Redford Theater last May and will be presented by the Vero Beach Florida Theater Guild in February 2024. Adapted from Peter Ferry’s award-winning novel, Old Heart is an inspiring mixed race love story that illuminates the courage of two young people fighting to save lives in a divided country at the war’s end.”
The story
Old Heart tells the story of African American GI Tom Johnson who joins forces with 24-year-old Sarah van Praag and the Dutch resistance to smuggle food and supplies from the liberated south across Nazi lines to starving cities in the northern Netherlands. Their brief love affair collapses at the war’s end, and sixty years later Johnson, about to be sent off to assisted living by his family, disappears on a flight to Amsterdam. While his children desperately try to locate him, Johnson is determined to track down Sarah. See the trailer here.
The novel
Hear Peter Ferry’s Interview with WGN’s Rick Kogan.
Peter Ferry’s award-winning novel Old Heart (Unbridled Books, 978-1-60953-117-1), has garnered a steadily widening readership since its first appearance in 2015. Dave Eggers called the book “astonishing.” The Chicago Tribune says the novel “will stay with you for keeps.” And Publishers Weekly asserts the novel is “life-affirming.”