London To Brighton

Hang out with would-be filmmakers in Britain for any period of time and you'll hear a familiar litany of woes – all under the heading about how awfully difficult it is to get a film made.

Funding bodies, you'll hear, are conservative and over-cautious, ruinous changes to scripts are routinely demanded, and money is grindingly slow to come through. Some filmmakers become so demoralised, they simply give up.

Yet a startling new British film, London to Brighton, stands as a beacon of hope. It was shot on a shoestring £80,000, raised from private investors, by a young production team. Its script, by first-time writer-director Paul Andrew Williams, remained essentially unchanged. It opens in Britain in two weeks' time.

"We shot it under the radar, so to speak," says producer Rachel Robey, 30. "That was the plan – to make it quickly and quietly, with confidence in the script and the director."

More from David Gritten in The Telegraph.
Lorraine Stanley (left) and Georgia Groome in London To Brighton, written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams.