02/05/2008

The UK Film Council has announced its first awardees for the First Feature Film Development Programme. They include three writers who are totally new to films.

First-time scriptwriter Neth Knowles gets £10,300 for The Bailey Method – about a 23-year-old slacker who falls crazily in love with a girl who only dates actors. Eleana Fuller was awarded £10,000 for her first screenplay Greener – about a young woman coming to terms with her mother’s death. Richard Fordyce’s first script, Guardian of the Shore, nets him £10,600. The script looks at the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Writer/script editor Ruth McCance gets £23,500 to develop Capital, inspired by Francis Wheen’s biography about Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Short filmmaker Zam Salim has been awarded £10,600 for Laid Off, a comedy about love and life in the Afterlife. And, award-winning documentary filmmaker Jocelyn Cammack receives £10,600 for A Necessary Life – a feature documentary on three extraordinary women who live in a residential home for the “active elderly”.

UKFC Development Fund Head Tanya Seghatchian said, “We are delighted to be launching the First Feature Development Programme with such a diverse range of projects and voices. It is real testimony to the fund’s belief that there is exciting new talent out there to be discovered and nurtured, and the team looks forward to working on the projects and helping to navigate them forward.”

The Programme was launched in October last year and awards will be announced four times a year. Mentors for the awardees include Simon Beaufoy, Ayub Khan Din and Pawel Pawlikowski.