Hadeel Reda, the formerpresident of Winchester Films, has struck out on her own with a new LA-basedfilm production and financing outfit called Purple Pictures.

Reda has secured adevelopment and overhead fund from private European equity investors and optionedthree youth-driven genre projects led by horror thriller The Fearwritten by Eduardo Carrillo and Joshua Friedlander.

Myles Nestel, a formerpartner in and head of business affairs at Cobalt Media Group, brought theproject to Purple and will produce with Reda and the writers' manager MichaelBecker.

Nestel is also involved asexecutive producer of the two other Purple pictures with Reda; romantic comedy TheHottie And The Nottie which is written by Heidi Ferrer (How To Deal)and will be produced by Reda, Victoria Nevinny and Neal Ramer, and heistthriller The Lesser Evil which is written by Patrick Cirillo (TearsOf The Sun) and being produced by Reda, Graham Ludlow and Michael Gruber.

"I am focusing onyouth-driven pictures because, with the DVD market growing so fast, they offerthe best return on investment for films of this $12m to $25m range," Reda toldScreen. "The market is always going to want films that kids are going to see ona Friday night."

Reda, in Cannes to meet withpossible foreign partners and distributors, said that she will have UStheatrical distribution in place on each of the films and is working on aninnovative financing structure for the films which she says will be favourableboth to the studio and equity investor.

Reda will continue tooversee Winchester/Content projects in development in LA including ForeverAnd A Day at Warner Independent Pictures and The Divide which wasdeveloped at Wind Dancer and which is now housed at Joel Silver's SilverPictures.