B.C. writer/director Aubrey Nealon thought that Canadian Images programmer Diane Burgess was playing a joke on him when she called to tell him his feature A Simple Curve was opening this year’s program.

Burgess wasn’t joking.

‘I knew right away, at the end of the first screening, that this was the opener,’ she recalls. ‘It’s a gem – a great story, done really well.’

The idea behind Curve came naturally to Nealon. ‘It sprang from my experiences growing up as a hippie kid in B.C.’s Slocan Valley,’ he says, adding that it is nonetheless not autobiographical. ‘Yes, I did grow up in New Denver [where the film was shot.] Yes, my parents are hippie draft dodgers.’ But that’s where the biographical aspects end.

Main character Caleb (Kris Lemche), a junior partner with his father Jim (Michael Hogan) in a carpentry shop, can relate to his father’s reverence for woodworking, but not his fiscally self-sabotaging ways. When a wealthy ex-hippie arrives in the valley to build a fishing lodge, tensions grow to the point where Caleb stands up to his father once and for all.

The script won the Writers Guild of Canada’s 2002 Jim Burt Award for best feature screenplay by an unproduced writer. ‘It’s a rare script that hooks you immediately,’ says producer George Baptist. ‘Given his talent as a director, there was no doubt that we had to make this movie.’

The drama with comedic elements took five years to make from start to delivery to Montreal’s Domino Film and Television earlier this year. Nealon, speaking from the Toronto festival, where Curve played in the Canada First! series, notes that, with a price tag of $1.3 million, it isn’t a low-budget regional film.

‘Telefilm Canada – and especially B.C. Film – championed the film. B.C. Film gave us some of their last money, holding it for us until we were ready,’ he says.

At 15, Nealon (now 34), headed for Vancouver to become an actor, landing a gig playing Olaf, a Finnish exchange student on the teen soap opera Fifteen. Seeing that the people behind the cameras were having more fun than he was, he enrolled in a one-year program at Vancouver Film School.

‘It’s a competitive program, for better or for worse,’ he notes. ‘It’s not for everyone, but it worked for me. It was definitely an essential first step on my path,’ taking him to the Canadian Film Centre in 2000.

Right out of the gate, Nealon’s been touted as one to watch. His quirky short film Abe’s Manhood (2000) won a Shavick Award for best emerging director in Western Canada and debuted at TIFF 2000 before going on to screen at more than 20 international film festivals. The white-collar black comedy In Memoriam (2001) debuted at TIFF the following year and was included in the video Made in Canada Vol. 1: Best of the CFC. In 2004, he won the first $10,000 Don Haig Award, given annually to a promising Canadian filmmaker.

Nealon explains that ‘shorts are satirical, ironic – to be enjoyed from a distance. They’re not meant to engage people like a feature must. I didn’t know if I could do it.’ But positive buzz at Toronto’s sold-out world premiere would indicate that he did.

The film hits Canadian theaters in late October, with hopes of an international deal.

www.asimplecurve.com