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A reel success story for young film buff

11/ 5/2006

SUCCESS at a French cinema festival with his debut movie has put an aspiring Didsbury film creator on the road to fulfilling lifelong dreams of movie-making stardom.

Steen Agro's Anglo-Czech collaboration, Shut Up and Shoot Me, scooped three of the four main awards at the Cherbourg Film Festival, winning best film from both the expert jury and the audience, as well as the best actor award.

The festival profiled six independent films from Britain and Ireland, but following this success, Steen's movie has been lined up to appear at the prestigious Karlovy Vary film festival in the Czech Republic.

It has also earned the black 'suicide comedy' - a sought-after review from industry bible Variety, and now Steen, of Cavendish Avenue, hopes the film will gain wider distribution further afield.

An avid film fan, Steen saved for a year to buy an Argos camera to make his first film aged eight but, after twice failing to get in to film school, he embarked on a career in advertising.

Shut up and Shoot Me, co-produced with Storitel's Paul Sherwood and David Rauch and Jeffery Brown of UFO Pictures, is his debut movie.

Filmed in the Czech Republic, the film combines English and foreign actors, and sees a suicidal English tourist, depressed by the sudden demise of his wife squashed underneath a statue, hire a Czech amateur hitman to kill him.

Steen, 41, said: "I wanted to make a very low budget film that I had more control over, where you can establish a style and put your own stamp on it.

"The Czechs have got a dark sense of humour, similar to us Brits. In fact someone once told me that if made by a Czech writer the film would be exactly the same - except nobody would die!"