Artist Barbara Dillas is about to be immortalised on screen when a film of her murals is shown tomorrow at the island’s first Bermuda Black Film Festival.

The idea came from Dan Egan, the director, writer and producer, when he featured her mural of living legend Clyde Best in his powerful documentary on the football star.

Mr Egan spent six years producing the award-winning Transforming the Beautiful Game: The Clyde Best Story.

Now a short documentary, five minutes long, is to be screened tomorrow on Ms Dillas’s work around the island entitled Walls of Inspiration: Where Cultural Memory Becomes Living Legacy.

Ms Dillas said: “It is really exciting. This will be my third movie. I am in the Clyde Best one, and I was in one that I created.

“This just gets better and better, way beyond my dream.”

Mr Egan said: “We did a short film featuring Barbara and all her murals, and it’s amazing. They are on bus stops, sailing clubs and community projects.”

The film explores how murals and public art preserve the people, stories and achievements that shape communities and carry their history forward.

Mr Egan explained that Walls of Inspiration grew out of footage, stories and discoveries made during the production and international tour of Transforming the Beautiful Game as Mr Best’s story travelled from Bermuda and London to communities across North America.

The film-maker told how he became increasingly interested in the murals encountered along the way, and the role they play as living records of history.

Ms Dillas, a former art teacher at Sandys Secondary Middle School, produced the massive mural on Mr Best at the street named after him in Somerset, Clyde Best Lane. It runs the length of a wall bordering Somerset Cricket Club.

The 75-year-old, from Somerset, said: “I came up with the idea for Clyde’s mural at about three o’clock in the morning one day and I said to myself that I wanted to do this mural about him.

“I said to Clyde, ‘They have given you a name on a street, but we need to recognise you while you are still here.’

“And he said to me: ‘Who can we get to do it?’

“We actually grew up together in the same street, Beacon Hill, before I lived in the US when I was at university, then came back to Somerset.

“I have 23 murals now. I actually started doing bus stops by putting images, not just spraying, way back in 1987.

“Then my first mural was done in Front Street on plywood boards.

“The one for Clyde took five months and I still go back to add to it. I got some children from my old school at Sandys to help me out, and their names are at the far end of the mural.

“I was a teacher for 29 years, and at Sandys for 19 years. I went back to the art department and got their teachers to get the children to come down here and gave them sections to do.

“I also did the mural of Clyde at the corner of Cambridge Road, and that only took three months to put it together. I like that spot, as so many people pass by and see it.

“My two favourite murals are the Clyde Best ones in Somerset — the one in Cambridge Road and the one at Clyde Best Lane.”

Ms Dillas told of the inspiration that got her started.

She said: “Years ago, guys used to spray the walls and bus shelters because somebody had died in a bike accident.

“So I took that concept where I felt they were creating a memorial and I turned it into a positive entity.”

Ms Dillas said she added “the names of businesses that were in Somerset, like carpenters and barbers, any kind of business — even restaurants that had come and left”.

“In a way, it was almost a memorial for businesses and, fingers crossed, the murals have never been sprayed.”