LIVERPOOL is to stage two world premieres in the space of a week for feature films made on Merseyside using almost entirely local talent.

The first, a horror film called Salvage set on the old set of the Brookside soap in West Derby, premieres tonight at Fact in Wood Street while the other red carpet event for Kicks, about two girls obsessed with a Premiership footballer, takes places next Monday at the Odeon Liverpool One.

They are both winners of the Digital Departures initiative which was officially launched by Northwest Vision and Media, together with its partners, the Liverpool Culture Company, the UK Film Council and the BBC. The object was to make three innovative micro-budget feature films in Liverpool, for the 2008 Capital of Culture celebrations, each with a budget of £250,000.

The third, completed as the first of the three earliest this year, was Of Time and the City, directed by acclaimed Liverpool film director Terence Davies and produced by Hope Street-based Hurricane Film Productions. It won massive acclaim when it was shown to critics at this year’s Cannes Festival and the creators of the other two are hoping for something similar.

Julie Lau, the Liverpool born producer of Salvage, believes that all three films prove that enough is in place to make the burgeoning film industry here “sustainable”.

“A lot of people are coming to Liverpool now to make films because they know it has all the things in place to make it self sufficient, from the variety of different locations available in a relatively small catchment area to the units of industrial infrastructure themselves,” said Ms Lau, who comes from Aigburth. “These two films will help to raise the profile even further of what can be done here.”

The old Brookside set proved to be ideal for the setting for Salvage which stars Neve McIntosh, Kevin Harvey, Shaun Dooley and Trevor Hancock and tells the tale of a cul-de-sac community in Wirral surrounded by a special ops military unit and ordered to stay indoors after a deadly cargo is washed ashore in a container.

“Brookside was ideal because even though they’re not proper homes – they have no water or electricity for instance – it meant we could create a horror film on what appears to be a real housing estate without causing too much disruption,” said the producer who has worked on other Liverpool based feature films such as O Jerusalem, in which it was necessary to transform Water Street in the city centre into 1945 downtown New York.

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