A GRADUATE filmmaker will have her final-year project screened at the world’s most prestigious film festival.

Eva Riley, who lives in Brighton, has had short film Patriot selected to be shown at the Cannes International Film Festival.

She wrote and directed Patriot for her master’s degree at the National Film and Television School in Buckinghamshire and sent it to the judges not expecting them to select it for the exclusive festival.

The 15-minute film was picked out from more than 4,550 submissions from more than 100 countries.

Patriot is one of the nine pictures nominated for the short film Golden Palm which is one of the festival’s highest honours. The 28-year-old said she was not “holding out hope” but was “overwhelmed” when she received the thumbs up.

Patriot tackles issues around nationalism and follows 11-year-old Hannah whose father leads a far-right group.

Hannah feels pushed out as her father rallies his supporters for a nationalist march and heads into the countryside on her bicycle where she meets a boy from the Roma community in an encounter which changes her life.

Scottish-born Miss Riley said: “I had this vague image in my head of a girl wearing an England flag as a cape and I thought it was very interesting to explore the idea of a child in a nationalist family.

“In my final year it came back to me and I pitched the idea to my producer and we just worked on it from there and developed it further.

“The main inspiration was looking at quite a loaded topic like the far right groups through a child’s eyes.”

She said it was a case of “life imitating art” as she watched the rise of the far-right and nationalism in the UK She citied experiences of living in Brighton during March for England while writing the film as “interesting research”.

Currently out at the festival in France Miss Riley said her next project is to work on her first feature film.