IT may not be that Birkenhead is often described as "beautiful" but author and film director Helen Walsh chooses her words carefully.

Although the town is not named as the location of her film The Violators it is exactly what Helen was looking for when she set out to make her debut movie.

It will be screened tonight at the Light Cinema in New Brighton, at 7.30pm, followed by a question and answer with Helen and cast members Lauren McQueen and Brogan Ellis.

Helen was born in in Warrington and lives in Wirral.

Wirral Globe:

Author and director Helen Walsh

As well as gaining wide critical acclaim as a published author - recently back from a world book tour - she has received four and five star reviews for her film at various festival screenings.

The Guardian described it as "ticking radioactively with unease."

But award-winning Helen tells the Globe - on the day of the Wirral screening - that she doesn't read reviews of her own work.

"I do stay around after a screening and listen to people who have come and paid to see my film. I find the feedback really important," she said.

Helen is excited that The Violators will be screened in "its spiritual home."

She says: "The entire film was shot on a modest budget with the help of the British Film Institute Fund in and around a six mile radius of Birkenhead and the opening scene takes place in the penny arcade, just across the road from the Light Cinema.

"Just as my first novel Brass was a love letter to Liverpool, this is very much a love letter to beautiful Birkenhead, capturing the poetic brutality of a landscape on the cusp of change."

Helen, who has lectured at John Moores University, is a graduate from the University of Liverpool.

She penned the best-selling novels Once Upon a Time in England and Go To Sleep.

She used local talent in her production team and extras came from the Birkenhead area.

The Violators now marks her directorial debut. She wanted to be very much "hands on" from day one.

"It was my vision," she says.

"As writer and director I am accountable. I delivered my finished screenplay and fought for that very vision.

"It is different from working on a novel. My screenplay was only 70 pages and in that you have to bring out the subtlety of the relationships . that the performances bring out.

"I wouldn't have wanted another director. Someone else might have been heavy handed with it and taken it in a different direction.

She says filming in Birkenhead was "incredible."

"I loved walking around the four bridges and seeing these cinematic landscape - the rusting cranes. I wanted to bring it to life - the desolation, the beauty.

"Birkenhead has been socially and geographically marginalised and cut adrift.

"I wanted to reflect the integrity of the landscape .

"I hope the film conveys that honesty and integrity.

"It is a challenging story - morally ambiguous."

Helen says recent screenings in Keswick, London, Liverpool and Manchester has seen a wide-aged group audience.

The story focuses on Shelly who meets Rachel, two dysfunctional girls from radically opposed backgrounds who set off on a collision course that will leave one of them shattered, the other re-born.

It charts a teenage girl's path from battle-hardened cynicism to the hope of a better life; a meditation on the meaning of home, and the potency and fragility of young girls' sexuality.

READ PETER GRANT''S REVIEW ON FRIDAY.