Avril E. Russell

Born and raised in Nottingham, she began making films from an early age. Self-taught as a Screenwriter and trained as a film and video technician at Nottingham's late, lamented Intermedia Film and Video, 'birthplace' of other film makers such as Shane Meadows, Steven Sheil, and Chris Cooke. Started screenwriting to generate material to direct, but revealing this prodigious talent has often worked against her in a UK industry suspicious of the "double-threat" (Writer-Director). Her many short films have been shown around the world, at numerous film festivals. She can count Quentin Tarantino as a fan of her early work. As a writer-for-hire she has developed numerous feature scripts for other directors. In 2007 she won Best Script at the Long Beach Action On Film International Film Festival with the unproduced female-led action thriller "Bulletproof". She was a finalist for Best Script at the Pennsylvania's Spirit Quest film festival, 2010 and says she would enter more competitions if "clicking boxes on the Internet wasn't so bloody tiresome". She counts Christopher Nolan, Kathryn Bigelow, Norman Jewison and Peter Weir as major influences. She lives in London with her family.