Australian filmmaker Darran Scott has been commissioned to write and direct a feature based on the true story of a woman who grew up in the Dutch East Indies and spent four years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during WW2.
Covenant Communications, a US publishing and distribution company based in Salt Lake City, is funding the development of As I Have Loved You, based on the autobiography by Kitty de Ruyter-Bons.
“It’s the true story of her childhood growing up in the Dutch East Indies when the Japanese invaded when she was eight,” Scott tells IF. “From a life of privilege in a family of plantation owners, she spent four years in a Japanese concentration camp and was then evacuated back to Holland, where she lived in poverty.”
Scott’s company Shearwater Entertainment will co-produce with Covenant and another company, likely to be Singaporean. He plans to start shooting in Australia in the second half of 2015, using the producer offset, after he finishes The Spirit of the Game.
Set in Melbourne in 1956, that film will chronicle the true story of American missionaries who put together a basketball team to help the Australians prepare for their first ever Olympic basketball tournament and how they defeated all the competition in a pre-Olympic tournament.
US distribution has been arranged through Excel Films and Scott is seeking a high profile US actor to play one of the leads.
Scott is also attached to write and direct for Covenant Communications Road To Bountiful, a road movie based on a novel by Donald Smurthwaite, which tells of a spoilt young college brat who is paid by his wealthy aunt to drive her elderly father from North Dakota to a nursing home in Salt Lake City.
En route they encounter a multitude of adventures and mishaps which eventually draws them closer together and changes the young man’s outlook on life and the old man’s outlook on death.
Scott’s debut film, The Playbook, an Australian drama about a basketball coach whose life is torn apart after a tragic accident, will be released on at least 140 screens in the US in February.