A horror film ”influenced” by the brutal murder of an Angus woman has secured a distributor in North America.
Graders tells of a woman’s search for her sister who has gone missing while working in a fish factory in the remote Scottish Highlands.
The micro-budget film’s writer and director David Hutchison graduated from Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art. Scenes for the film were shot in Lochinver, Kinlochbervie, Buckie and Edinburgh. The cast features Slumdog Millionaire star Janet de Vigne.
Mr Hutchison said he recalled the murders of Jolanta Bledaite and serial killer Peter Tobin’s Polish victim Angelika Kluk while writing the screenplay.
Graders has already been shown at events in Inverness and Edinburgh and New York company Striped Entertainment will now distribute the film in the US.
Jolanta’s head and hands were found on the seafront at Arbroath in 2008, days after the farm worker had been suffocated and dismembered by fellow Lithuanians Vitas Plytnykas and Aleksandras Skirda in her Brechin flat.
They thought Jolanta had up to £10,000 in a bank account and believed no one would know she was missing.
Miss Kluk (23) was murdered in Glasgow in 2006 by serial killer Tobin.
Mr Hutchison told The Courier: ”I remember reading about the Jolanta case and it was because she was an immigrant worker and didn’t have a big network of friends and you could go missing more easily.
”I was quite keen on the idea of exploring a worker … because when I worked in a prawn factory people would only be there for a few days and then they would be gone. There wasn’t any check-ups on these people, so that’s the nearest it is to these cases.”
Plytnykas and Skirda were jailed for life for suffocating 35-year-old Jolanta at her flat and dismembering her body.
They threatened, bound and gagged their fellow countrywoman on her bedroom floor while Plytnykas twice tried to use her bank cards and PIN codes and Skirda stood guard over her while smoking a cigarette.
After the first unsuccessful attempt to withdraw money, the duo assaulted her and even after they got the cash they suffocated her with a pillow before chopping up her body.
They transported body parts across Angus by bus in Lidl shopping bags and dumped them in Arbroath harbour hoping the waves would wash away the evidence.