Up-and-coming female film-maker Reed Morano has been selected to shoot Lioness, the Ellen Page-led independent war drama about a gay US marine charged with forging close bonds with the wives of Taliban fighters, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Morano, a successful cinematographer who made her directorial debut on the critically-acclaimed Tribeca film festival smash Meadowland earlier this year, takes charge of a film with an unusual combination of themes.

The spectacular blockbuster success of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper in the US earlier this year has led studios to green-light several tales of military heroism. The Reese Witherspoon biopic Ashley’s War, about a pioneering elite woman soldier who fought in Afghanistan, joins an adaptation of the bestselling 2014 memoir Code Name: Johnny Walker, by American Sniper co-author Jim DeFelice, on studio slates.

Likewise Lioness’s gay themes are typical of independent Hollywood cinema’s recent push into LGBT territory, as exemplified by the Toronto film festival debutant Freeheld, which stars Page opposite Julianne Moore as a lesbian couple fighting for equal rights under US law, and Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl, which stars Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne as pioneering transgender artist Lili Elbe and debuted this month at the Venice film festival ahead of an expected awards season push.

In Lioness, Page stars as Lance Corporal Leslie Martz, who was sent to Afghanistan as leader of a Female Engagement Team aimed at fostering greater independence for local women while gathering information about their insurgent husbands. The film will show how she became conflicted by her loyalty to her targets while fighting to keep her sexuality a secret from army bosses. Morano hopes to shoot in April next year.