CLAIRE Mundell thinks there's something missing from Scottish movies.

The 43-year-old film producer, Glasgow born and bred, goes to the cinema just like the rest of us.

She's seen films about Glasgow gangs and Glaswegian alcoholics. She's seen movies about the Loch Ness monster. Some she's liked, some she hasn't.

But what she hasn't seen much of, she says, is the Scotland she lives in. She hopes she's about to put that right.

Next year, budget permitting, shooting will start on her new Glasgow-based romantic comedy Not Another Happy Ending.

"I think it's fair to say that, with the film, we are portraying a slice of Glagow life that's under-represented, if represented at all," says Claire, who won a Scottish Bafta for the children's fantasy series Shoebox Zoo.

Not Another Happy Ending – written by Glasgow-born writer David Solomons and starring rising star Emun Elliott and Karen Gillan, fresh from Doctor Who, in her first major film role – charts the relationship between a publisher and his most successful author.

Its producer describes it as Bill Forsyth meets Woody Allen in Glasgow. Neds, quite clearly, it is not. Mundell says: "I live in a contemporary Glasgow which has all shades and facets to it. I have felt quite passionately with this film that I want to find a way of portraying the bustling creativity and the energy and the attitude that I know to be in Glasgow."

It's an idea echoed by her cast and crew. Gillan told The Herald: "I was immediately drawn to David Solomon's script of Not Another Happy Ending as it shows a side of Scotland rarely seen on screen. It's upbeat, warm and funny. I'm really excited to get started and so happy to be shooting in Glasgow."

The film's director, John Mckay, who also directed some episodes of controversial Glasgow-based BBC drama Lip Service, is equally excited about the film's break from the norm of Scottish movies.

He said: "I've wanted for a long time to make the equivalent of a classic Woody Allen film – about literate, funny, neurotic, likeable, middle-class people – in Scotland, but never quite found the subject. I think this is it. In Scotland, we're often stuck in a spin-cycle between Trainspotting and Nessie – the Movie. Here's a chance to make a funny, grown-up indie movie, a Squid And The Whale, or a Hannah And Her Sisters for Glasgow, a movie compact in budget but big in heart, ambition, reach and smart."

Mundell agrees: "It's either miserablism at one end or it's the kitsch and the kaleyard at the other. That spin-cycle between those two stereotypes, if we're not careful, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It starts to be expected by the market."

Not Another Happy Ending is an attempt to break that cycle. And it's not the only one. Mundell points to the fact that Still Game star Gregory Hemphill and Donald Cleary have just done a surrealist comedy pilot, Bluehaven, for the BBC. And we're still waiting to see the David Tennant/Kelly MacDonald romcom Decoy Bride.

"Annie Griffin is attached to an adaptation of the Proclaimers musical," Mundell points out, "and you can't get much more uplifting than that."

After years in which Scottish cinema and TV has been associated with grim, grinding misery – in everything from Ratcatcher on the big screen to The Scheme and Field of Blood on the small screen – it's as if someone had turned the lights on.

And, Mundell has found, among distributors, agents and financiers, that has come as something of a relief. "When I talk to people about the film I hear a lot of excitement about presenting a different view of Glasgow and Scotland. I think there is an appetite out there."

Given that she's pushing to raise the last tranche of the film's sub-£1million budget that's good news for Mundell and her team. And she's hoping it might open doors for new funding streams.

"On this film we've been trying to make contact with iconic Scottish brands that may be interested in being associated with a confident, upbeat film. I've had some very interesting conversations with a couple of them."

It's something business brands in Scotland don't think about, she says, but they're missing a trick.

"Television advertising is on the decline, everybody's fast-forwarding adverts. But if the brand is allied to the tone of the film then it can be a good relationship for them and there's a good opportunity for forward-thinking brands to associate themselves with a good piece of cinema."