Scottish Screen Selected For Sundance

Two films supported by Creative Scotland are to receive world premieres at this year's Sundance Film Festival, running from 16-26 January at Park City, Utah, USA.
Exchange & Mart and God Help the Girl have been selected for this year's festival, as Sundance marks its 30th anniversary.
God help the Girl, written and directed by Stuart Murdoch, lead singer of the group Belle and Sebastian, is a musical feature film produced by Barry Mendel, with Co-Producer Carole Sheridan of Singer Films and Associate Producer Beth Allen of Forest of Black. The film stars Emily Browning, Olly Alexander and Hannah Murray and will be screened in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition.
It tells of "a better summer, or at least a summer when something happened. It happened to a boy and a girl in a city roughly the same size and population of Glasgow. Perhaps the canals were a bit grimier, the high-rise buildings taller, the streets emptier when you needed them to be, and the beat clubs busier than the ones around here. But on the whole the city was this one."
The film was shot, edited, scored and mixed in Glasgow over the course of 2012-2013 and will be released in cinemas around the world in 2014 following its world premiere at Sundance on 18 January.
Starring Ewen Bremner, Grace Chilton and Tania Van Amse, Exchange & Mart is a short about a boarding school girl coming of age during a self-defence exercise. It was directed by Cara Connolly and Martin Clark, produced by Phoebe Grigor and Maeve McMahon and the script was written by Cara Connolly.
Exchange & Mart was selected from more than 8,000 entries to screen in the Shorts Competition.
On being selected for the Sundance Film Festival Film, the team said: "We are thrilled that our film has been selected for Sundance 2014. We had amazing commitment from our fantastic crew, and were honoured to work with such a great cast. We would like to thank Scottish Shorts for their help and support. Team Exchange & Mart can't wait to be standing in the Utah winter snow, skiing for Scotland."
The film received support through the Scottish Shorts programme designed to discover and develop writers, directors and producers. The programme is a collaboration between Hopscotch Films and DigiCult, with funding from Creative Scotland.
Head of Development & Executive Producer at DigiCult Paul Welsh said: "Cara and Martin's Sundance selection is an absolutely fantastic result for a Scottish documentary team working in narrative fiction for the first time. With the right level of investment and focused support, Scotland can generate world class filmmaking talent. Exchange and Mart is further proof of this at a key time in the development of filmmaking in the country."
www.sundance.org
(IT/JP)