Can Northumberland director win an Oscar?

Otto Bell, who was born and bred in the Alnwick area, directed and produced the breathtaking feature, The Eagle Huntress.

The fascinating film follows 13-year-old Aisholpan, as she trains to become the first girl in 12 generations of her Kazakh family to become an eagle hunter.

The documentary has grossed $1.7million at the US box office and is also being shown in UK cinemas, including Alnwick Playhouse.

And things could get even better. The film is one of 15 titles to advance to the shortlist of the Academy’s feature documentary competition for February’s Oscars, having been whittled down from 145.

The Academy’s documentary branch will now choose five nominees, to be announced next month. Otto, 35, works for CNN in New York. He said: “There is a long way to go, but it feels great to be an Oscar contender.”

The Eagle Huntress began when director Otto Bell first laid eyes on one of the most remarkable images he had ever seen: A radiant young girl on a mountain top, joyfully casting a majestic eagle into the air.

The pictures of the girl, Aisholpan, taken by Israeli photographer Asher Svidensky, enchanted Bell, but the BBC News headline, A 13-Year-Old Eagle Huntress in Mongolia, intrigued him even more.

He remembers: “I knew that somewhere in the world this girl was out there walking around. There was a film that needed to be made about her and I wanted to be the one to make it.”

Bell was undeterred by the fact that he had never made a single feature documentary before. Up until then, he had travelled the globe making branded content short documentaries.

But he hungered to do something on a larger scale than his shorts. He tracked down Svidensky on Facebook and they discussed the idea of a film.

As they began talking, the photos went viral. “I saw this as proof,” says Bell, a former pupil of Alnwick’s Duchess’s Community High School. “If so many others felt as strongly about the photos as I did, I had to be on to something.”