How a Yorkshire woman's story of survival is helping to promote Leonardo Di Caprio's Revenant

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Hugh Glass, in The Revenant directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Pic: Twentieth Century Fox via AP

The film starring Leonardo Di Caprio has already won plenty of praise from critics.

Directed by Academy Award winning-director Alejandro Iñárritu, the film has received awards Best Motion Picture, Best Director for Iñárritu and Best Actor for DiCaprio at the Golden Globes and is hotly tipped for Oscar success.

While the glitz of Hollywood may seem a long way away from the green and pleseant lands of Yorkshire, The Revenant has quite a close connection to the region both in story and production.

Survivor: Marina Chapman was kidnapped and abandoned in the Colombian jungle.

Leeds-based video production company Mothership UK has created one of only three short films being used for the worldwide marketing campaign of the major Hollywood production.

To help market the picture 20th Century Fox and Los Angeles-based agency Artery Industries commissioned a series of three short films – entitled ‘I Shouldn’t Be Alive’ - and they contracted Leeds-based Mothership UK as their UK production partner to produce one of the films.

The short film that Mothership UK was chosen to create tells the extraordinary story of Marina Chapman from Colombia. Ms Chapman, who now lives in Bradford, was kidnapped as a small child and left abandoned, to die in a South American jungle.

She survived by watching a family of Capuchin monkeys, feeding off food they dropped, and watching where they ate and drank.

The film about Ms Chapman and her early life was directed by Mothership UK’s founder and creative director Zsolt Sándor. The company was tasked with producing, directing and providing all production services for the film. It was shot on location in Bradford in September 2015 and post-produced in Los Angeles.

Mr Sándor told The Yorkshire Post that the company got the contract out of the blue after the producers in LA found Mothership’s contact details online. “It was one of those magic moments where you get an email out of the blue,” he explains.

The producers in LA were the ones who had decided that they wanted to tell the extraordinary story of Ms Chapman. “Basically we decided how we wanted to shoot,” added the 38-year-old creative director.

Ms Chapman and her family were incredibly accomodating to the team of four who shot the film, even insisting on cooking for them, said Mr Sándor.

He described talking to the survivor as a “humbling experience”.

Off the back of this success for Mothership Mr Sándor is targetting further content marketing opportunities. “This is really great for us because this is an area I’ve wanted to move the company towards,” he said.