Born on a cocktail napkin shortly after writer, director and coproducer Ryan Bonder chased down his soon-to-be wife in Europe, DayDrift makes its world premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

The story came about less than two years ago when Bonder was set up on a date with coproducer and now-wife Margot Dear. Despite his reluctance, the two fell instantly in love and then Dear moved to Europe. Unable to live without her, Bonder, with camera in hand, set off to track her down. Part way there, his film and camera were stolen, and the idea of reconstructing somebody’s story through misplaced film was sparked.

‘I started to think: what if someone were to develop my film and look at it. There’s a story there,’ says Bonder, a first-time feature filmmaker.

DayDrift, a semi-autobiographical dramatic comedy, tells the story of a has-been photographer who, in the midst of putting together an art show that he hopes will revive his career, loses his camera and film. Through a series of bizarre events, he is ultimately led on a journey through his past.

‘It’s a film that people can identify with because we all have a past, and this idea of trying to understand it in order to understand where you are in the present is a universal theme,’ says Bonder.

Budgeted at roughly $700,000, the film, shot in Vancouver and Kamloops, was primarily self-financed with the aid of personal credit cards and Telefilm Canada for completion funding.

‘We didn’t have Telefilm attached until the last minute, so raising financing as you go was one of the biggest challenges,’ says Bonder. ‘When you don’t have a lot of money, it means a lot more work in order to ensure you’re producing something of quality.’

On his personal style, Bonder says, ‘I work with a kind of ‘hyper-realist’ tradition – taking reality and turning it up a few notches.’

But the film works in a lot of different traditions depending on the environment the character is entering, going from traditional slow dolly shots and soft lighting into more French new wave scenes filled with jump cuts.

‘Part of the journey is the style and how it changes and blends and works depending on where the character is being led.’

Bonder is currently in the early stages of script development on his next feature, Building Clouds, about an architect who gets lost in France, is mistaken for a famous Canadian filmmaker, and eventually assumes his new identity – and makes a film. Samantha Yaffe