After two sold-out screenings and heaps of praise at the Montreal World Film Festival, James Dunnison is taking his new feature Stuff to the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Directed, produced, edited and cowritten by Toronto-based Dunnison, Stuff is an admittedly bizarre tale of a young man who kills his overbearing mother, becomes the possessor of a magic ring that fell from the sky, and spends the rest of the film trying to redeem himself.

Shot over three weeks in Toronto, Dunnison says Stuff represents ‘the most fun I’ve had doing anything in production.’ He says his crew, comprised mostly of 22- and 23-year-olds, all working for free, was a joy, calling the lot ‘unkillable.’

The production was financed entirely by Dunnison and his wife Rebecca. The couple not only wrote the script but sold their apartment to get Stuff made. An executive producing nod goes to Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo).

The idea for Stuff came from a piece of dialogue written by Dunnison that he rediscovered while trying to come up with ideas his agent in Vancouver could use to shop him around. The dialogue (paraphrased by Dunnison himself) went something like this:

‘Have you ever noticed that sometimes you’ll be walking along the street and the sky is perfectly blue, but you feel a couple of raindrops? Have you ever noticed that when you flush a toilet in an airplane there is this loud suction noise and that the cabin pressure suddenly changes? Think there is a connection?’

From this, Dunnison envisioned an antique ring getting flushed down an airplane toilet and rocketing towards earth.

‘The story suddenly came to me,’ he says. ‘The ring falls on this unwitting guy, and with him being who he is with the history that he has and the family history that he has, he decides that this ring can change his life.’

The unwitting guy in this case is Philip, played by Max Danger, best known until now as the keyboard player for Toronto rock band The Deadly Snakes. Dunnison buzzes about Danger, who had never acted before the film, saying one of the most overused phrases at wff in reference to Danger and Stuff was, ‘That kid is a star!’

After its success at wff and screening at viff, Dunnison is still uncertain when the Toronto-rooted film will be shown in its home town. ‘It’s kind of ironic that it is a Toronto film and we’re getting all this attention elsewhere,’ he says.

Dunnison says production is slated to begin in the spring on his next project, Blackdog Blues (working title), a black comedy set on the West Coast and based on a script he developed as a writer resident at the Canadian Film Centre.