A FILM starring a young Huddersfield actress has been nominated for a Bafta.
The Arbor, a film about the life of controversial Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar, has been nominated for one of the prestigious film awards.
It stars University of Huddersfield student Natalie Gavin, who plays Dunbar.
Dunbar wrote Rita, Sue and Bob Too, which became a hard-hitting 1987 film set on Bradford's Buttershaw estate.
Over 20 years after Andrea's death in 1990, filmmakers Clio Barnard and Tracy O'Riordan revisited the estate to film The Arbor which tells her tragic story.
The pair are in the running to win the Bafta for outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer.
Natalie, 23, is in the final year of her drama and theatre studies course at the University.
The Arbor features interviews by people who knew Dunbar best when she lived on the Buttershaw estate, but these interviews are performed on screen by actors.
It documents Andrea's tragically short life and her troubled relationship with her daughter Lorraine.
Tony Earnshaw, head of film programming at the National Media Museum in Bradford, said the film deserved its nomination from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
“It is a most unusual and unique project. It is both a filmed biography of Andrea Dunbar and an absorbing memoir”, he said.
Described by one critic as “a genius straight from the slums”, Dunbar’s first foray into writing was when she was just 15.
She became the youngest person ever to have a play staged at London's Royal Court Theatre.
But it was the film of her play Rita, Sue and Bob Too which saw her reaching a national audience.
