Brian Pendreigh

It is six years now since Jim Hickey resigned as director of Edinburgh's Filmhouse cinema. He left the post he had occupied for 14 years with high hopes of establishing himself as an independent Scottish film producer. He had little idea of the years of frustration and disappointment that lay ahead.

Various feature film projects came to nothing before he secured a lottery grant in June 1997 for Daybreak, a drama set in Edinburgh's clubbing scene. The grant was announced at the same time as one for My Name is Joe, whose director, Ken Loach, went to the same school as Hickey, in Nuneaton.

It might have been a favourable omen. But while My Name is Joe went on to glory in Cannes last year, Hickey could not find the rest of the money he needed and the project looked like it might collapse. ''Things really were at their lowest ebb,'' he says, ''because the time on the lottery money was running out and there was no guarantee they would extend it.''

Eighteen months later Gaynor Purvis, an attractive young model, breaks down in tears in the corridor of an Edinburgh hotel. Jim Hickey knows just how she feels. But instead of extending a comforting arm he affords himself a wry smile. It is not sadism on Hickey's part, but relief and happiness. Purvis is acting out her breakdown for the benefit of the camera. Hickey's first feature film as producer is finally under way.

The Scottish Arts Council extended the deadline and C4's new low-budget film division, FilmFour Lab, announced Daybreak as its inaugural project in August this year. Two months later, Daybreak finally went into production on a budget approaching #1m.

Hickey, who served as Edinburgh Film Festival director for eight years during his Filmhouse stint, initially developed a slate of low-budget Scottish horror and action movies, including one about the legendary Sawney Bean, whose family lived in a cave near Ballantrae and ambushed, robbed, and ate travellers.

''In '93 I was convinced that things were changing for low-budget film-making,'' he says, over cafe lattes in the bar of the fashionable Point hotel, where the Daybreak crew are filming, just round the corner from the Filmhouse.

''You're talking about the period of Leon the Pig Farmer, Soft Top Hard Shoulder, and Staggered and there were a lot of people saying 'We can make low-budget films for #400,000 or #500,000'. I still believe there was a way of raising money through private finance . . . But what I found, with one exception, was there was no-one in Scotland willing to back that kind of film-making.''

In 1995 he produced Hunger Artist, a

40-minute short, written and directed by Bernard Rudden, a Glaswegian theatre and music video director. Adapted from a short story by Kafka, it presented a stylish, stark and bizarre portrait of a man who starves himself for a living.

Hunger Artist won a Herald Angel award at the 1995 Edinburgh International Film Festival and was bought by C4. But it never covered its costs and ''hunger artist'' might have been an apposite description for Hickey at this time.

Daybreak subsequently secured ''development finance'' from Scottish Screen and others to help cover early costs. Hickey got #3000 over three years - hardly sufficient for him to live up to the stereotypical image of a producer with fat cigar and open-topped sports car.

Hickey and Rudden worked together on a couple of abortive feature projects before embarking on Daybreak. By this time they had also linked up with James Mackay, a Scottish producer whose films included Derek Jarman's The Last of England.

Mackay was born in Inverness, but left Scotland to do a film course in London in the mid-seventies and until Daybreak had never made a film in his native land. He met Hickey when he helped with programming at the EIFF in the late seventies and got to know him better during Hickey's period as the

festival's director.

Mackay believed Rudden had a strong visual talent, which was not properly reflected in draft scripts, so the three of them discussed alternative approaches to securing the backing of financiers.

Rudden developed the Daybreak script through a series of workshops with his three principal actors - Flash, the Glasgow disc jockey, who had starred in Hunger Artist, Gaynor Purvis, and Diane Bell.

Flash plays a DJ with money problems who splits up with his girlfriend Anna (Purvis) who is lured into the world of a French pornographer (Jean-Phillippe Ecoffey from Ma Vie En Rose), who has a suite in the Point hotel.

Rudden and his principals shot what was effectively a trailer showcasing their talents, which was submitted to potential backers, along with the script.

It was always intended to shoot on digital video, which has become very fashionable with the success of Festen and the other Dogme films. One possible backer told Hickey that he thought he was a year or two ahead of his time.

But it was exactly the sort of cutting-edge project that FilmFour Lab was looking for. ''Bernard Rudden, I think, is potentially a very talented director,'' says Robin Gutch, head of the new division, which will have an executive in Glasgow to monitor new Scottish talent. ''He seemed a very appropriate new creative voice to back.''

Daybreak will not have the rough, grainy look of some films shot on the hoof with tiny camcorders and even, in the case of Harmony Korine's Julien Donkey-Boy, with hidden spy cameras.

Rudden has been working with a crew of about 30 experts and was attracted to video by aesthetic and practical considerations, including the scope for experimentation.

But Daybreak is not intended simply as an experimental film for film festivals. ''We always intended it to reach cinemas,'' says Hickey, ''whether it's as a specialist release, at the the Filmhouses and GFTs, or bigger in terms of crossing over to a multiplex audience because of the subject matter . . . the whole youth angle, the whole milieu of Edinburgh night life.''

There is nothing sadder in the film industry than the hundreds of film producers who have never made a film. Now, whatever Daybreak's ultimate fate, Jim Hickey will at least have earned the job description.