TICKETS ON SALE AT 17.00PM ON MONDAY 18TH FEBRUARY

Tickets for the Third International Screenwriters’ Festival will go on sale at 17.00pm Monday 18th February 2008. This year there will only be one ticket type, a three day pass and it is available to anyone and everyone. When the tickets go on sale there will initially be 50 early bird tickets available at £300.00 (inc. vat and c/card fees), but once they are gone the price will go up to £330.00 (inc. vat and c/card fees). A countdown on the new Festival homepage will show how many of the 50 tickets are left as they are sold.

If you purchase a ticket and you have entered 'A Pitch in Time' don't worry as if you are one of the lucky ten winners, you will have your ticket money refunded.

GUEST SPEAKER PROFILES

Each week we are going to send out an e-bulletin highlighting some, if not all, of the fantastic guest speakers we have coming to the Festival this year. The start the ball rolling here are profiles for BBC's Jane Tranter and writer Peter Kosminsky.

SPEAKER PROFILE - #1 - Jane Tranter Jane became Controller of BBC Fiction in October 2006. She leads the group which covers Drama Commissioning, Comedy Commissioning, Programme Acquisitions and BBC Films, covering around £500 million of output over four television channels, as well as being responsible for the accompanying new media activity. Jane commissions all television drama across BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three and BBC Four which have included recently: Five Days, Life on Mars, Bleak House, Doctor Who, Spooks, The Lost Prince, Torchwood, Hustle, Cranford, Lark Rise to Candleford, Sense and Sensibility, Coming Down The Mountain and Stuart: A Life Backwards. The newly appointed BBC Films’ board reports in to her, and she works with them to invest the BBC Films’ annual budget of £10 million into new British feature films.

SPEAKER PROFILE - #2 - Peter Kosminsky Peter Joined the BBC as General Trainee in 1980 straight from Oxford, working as a Drama Script Editor before moving to Current Affairs. He then moved to Yorkshire Television in 1985 as a Producer/Director. Documentaries included The Falklands War - The Untold Story, Afghantsi as well as the two-part drama Shoot to Kill about the Stalker affair by Michael Eaton. Since 1995, Peter has worked largely as a freelance drama director on productions such as No Child of Mine, Warriors and The Project. Recent projects as writer/director include The Government Inspector and Britz. Peter has also directed two feature films an adaptation of Wuthering Heights with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche and the Michelle Pfeiffer/Rene Zellweger drama White Oleander. A winner of the Alan Clarke Award for Outstanding Creative Contribution to Television and a Fellow of the Royal Television Society.’