A SUFFOLK film-maker missed out a Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival tonight.

A SUFFOLK film-maker missed out a Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival tonight.

Emma Sullivan, who has a home in Woodbridge, was tipped as a front runner in the short film competition with her movie After Tomorrow.

Her 15-minute film was made for �10,000 with money from Screen East.

It was praised as a taut, claustrophobic thriller with a remarkable - and extremely moving - twist at the end.

It tells the story of a man going to his wife's village who wakes up in a house to find two women there who refuse to let him leave the building.

But the Palme d'Or went instead to Joao Salaviza's Arena - a story of a man under house arrest who whiles away the time tattooing.

Ms Sullivan, 39, said she was thrilled to be nominated, but regretted that her father, who suffers from severe dementia, could not share in her success.

"It doesn't get much better than this," she said. "If you make a short film, to get to Cannes is pretty much the best thing that can happen.

"Sadly my dad was a film buff - he always wanted me to be a film maker, and he'll never know I made a film that got into Cannes.

"He'd have been very proud.'

Sullivan trained at the National Film and Television School, and said watching the sinister thriller Deliverance, starring Burt Reynolds, with her father when she was young had been an inspiration.

That film's director John Boorman was head of the jury that awarded the short film prize.