It seemed for a while that Janet van Eeden’s script, A Matter of Time was doomed to be forever the bridesmaid at the runaway blockbuster of the movie industry.

It was short-listed as a radio play out of 1100 entries in the BBC World’s Write Around the World competition in 1999. Then, as a film script, it was chosen out of 600 by Dv8 in 2001 but was finally not optioned. It was subsequently short-listed once more by Mnet into the final 19 out of 120 scripts in their recent Movie of the Month competition. However, at last this film is in actual development.

A Matter of Time has been optioned by Distant Eye films in the United Kingdom. Producers, Elaine Wickham (UK) and Carmelina Palumbo (Canada) and the writer are working with script editors from Working Title Films, amongst others, to craft the script into the finest it can be.

"Here is a story about a small Afrikaans town, inter-racial love and suppressed mysteries," says producer Elaine Wickham. “It reads like an American independent movie but it is based in South Africa. Many writers get their screenplays optioned, but few actually get them made. It is my intention to make this screenplay I’ve optioned. It has tremendous cross-over potential.”

The script still has to go through the process of two more rewrites.