Lottery Funding For New Films Announced

The UK Film Council’s Development Fund has announced Lottery funding for several new films being in partnership with BBC Films.
Jenny Borgars, Head of the UK Film Council's Development Fund said: "These projects represent a fantastic array of talent developing films that reflect and draw on our cultural heritage and which have the potential to impact at international level. We are really pleased to be continuing our work with the BBC and in doing so consolidating a partnership that helps to create sustainability within the UK film industry."
'Coram Boy' is an adaptation of the epic best-selling children’s novel by Jamila Gavin with Alison Owen (Sylvia, Proof, Shaun of the Dead) and Scott Rudin (Closer, Venus, The Queen) producing. Coram Boy was successfully bought to the stage last year by director Melly Still, with a sell-out run at the National Theatre.
Writer Stuart Beattie (Collateral, Pirates of the Caribbean) adapts Len Deighton’s acclaimed novel 'Bomber' about 24 hours of the Allied bombing campaign against Germany for producers Roger Randall-Cutler and Rob Cheek of the The First Film Company (Dance with a Stranger, The Commitments). Pete Travis (Vantage Point, Omagh) will direct.
'My Week with Marilyn' takes its inspiration from the memoirs of Colin Clark and tells of the week long friendship he had with screen legend Marilyn Monroe. Film and television writer Adrian Hodges (Rome, The Ruby in the Smoke, Metroland, Tom and Viv) is writing the script with Simon Curtis (Five Days, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, David Copperfield) to direct. David Parfitt of Trademark Films (Shakespeare in Love, The Madness of King George) is producing.
Brideshead Revisited, supported by the Development Fund, is now being co-funded by the UK Film Council’s Premiere Fund. Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots, Becoming Jane) will direct, with Robert Bernstein and Douglas Rae (Becoming Jane, The Waterhorse) producing for Ecosse Films. An adaptation of the classic novel by Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead was previously adapted into an award-winning television series directed by Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg. For the feature film, leading film and television writer Andrew Davies (Bridget Jones, TV’s Pride and Prejudice ) will work with writer Jeremy Brock (The Last King of Scotland).
The new slate of projects follow a successful chain of Development Fund-BBC partnered films including Andrea Arnold’s Cannes Jury prize winner Red Road; Justin Chadwick’s forthcoming feature The Other Boleyn Girl written by BAFTA and Golden Globe award-winning British screenwriter Peter Morgan; 'The Boleyn Inheritance', the sequel to 'The Other Boleyn Girl'; and 'Peter Pan in Scarlet', the film version of the official sequel to JM Barrie’s classic Peter Pan.
(DS)