With buzz building back home on her first credit, the unfinished Gettin' Square, Queensland-based producer Trish Lake is at Cannes with three projects.

The most advanced is The Digger, which is being written by the mother/son/stepfather team of Jan Bradnam, Ashley Bradnam and Terry McCann.

Babe director and co-writer Chris Noonan is script editing the drama, which is set in the world of rugby league and centres on the tension between a father and son who are part of a family of builders who work and play together.

Lake is also developing One More River, which has Kate Woods attached, director of 2000 local hit Looking For Alibrandi. It is an adaptation of Brenda Walker's novel of the same name and is television and theatre writer Linden Wilkinson's debut feature script. The drama is about a 50-something woman forced to make a decision after a young man arrives on her tropical island.

The key creators behind Getting' Square, writer Chris Nyst and Better Than Sex director Jonathan Teplitzky, are working on Lake's third project, which is titled Crooked Business. Similar knockabout characters that are creating interest in the trio's first collaboration - Nyst is a celebrated criminal lawyer -- will again inhabit the world they are creating. Lake owns Freshwater Productions with Nyst, and has gone to Cannes with Elizabeth Symes, who recently joined the production outfit.

Gettin' Square is one of the first films to be financed with money raised from the private sector by Australian investment bank Macquarie and dominant television broadcaster, The Nine Network.

Working Title Australia (the offshoot that produced Ned Kelly) tipped in 25% of the equity investment, giving the parent company world sales rights excluding Australian and New Zealand, where it will be released by Nine's sister company Hoyts. The Film Finance Corporation contributed a small slice of the budget. The production company alongside Freshwater is Mushroom Pictures.

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