David Bezmozgis says he drew heavily from his own experiences to make Victoria Day, a coming-of-age story about a young boy in 1980s Toronto.

‘Your own experiences can make the stuff of interesting fiction or film,’ says the 38-year-old author-turned-filmmaker. ‘I have to feel a personal connection. It has to feel real to me. I wanted to make a film about what it felt like to grow up in this city and do justice to the teenage experience.’

Victoria Day tells the story of Ben Spektor — a typical teenager who plays on the school hockey team, has Roman candle fights with his friends and goes to the local make-out park to drink and hook up with girls. But when a boy from his school goes missing and Ben is one of the last people to have seen him, he starts to question everything he used to find important.

Producer Judy Holm says Bezmozgis writes what he knows. ‘[David’s] world is very specific and he is a very talented portrayer and interpreter of that world,’ she says. ‘He managed to really stay in touch with the language and emotion of teenagers. He was able to access them. I think those two things together result in this movie having a unique and fresh perspective.’

It stars Mark Rendall as Ben, Holly Deveaux, John Mavro, Scott Beaudin, Sergiy Kotelenets, Nataliya Alyexeyenko, Melanie Leishman and Jeff Pustil.

Holm produces alongside Michael McNamara through their Markham Street Films and Bezmozgis under his Nada Films banner. Triptych Media’s Robin Cass and Anna Stratton exec produce.

The picture arrives on screens this Friday from E1 Entertainment, bowing on two in Toronto and another in Vancouver.

The ‘multi-pronged’ marketing push includes promotional appearances by actors Kotelenets and Alyexeyenko in Toronto’s Russian communities.

Bezmozgis himself has been giving screenings at high schools and talking to the kids about filmmaking. And yet he started out as an author. His first collection of short stories, Natasha and Other Stories, received critical acclaim and was chosen for inclusion in Canada Reads 2007. But he says he always planned on pursuing film, and in 2006 his script for Victoria Day was chosen for the Sundance Screen Writers Lab. The film played at that festival earlier this year.

Though this is his first feature, Bezmozgis knew from the get-go what he wanted. ‘I wanted the film to look cinematically rich and wanted the style to not distract from the central story… the story is at the forefront, that’s what I wanted’ he says.

He’s quick to point out that this was achieved in part because he got lucky with the crew.

‘Because service production is so low, all these wonderful technicians were looking for work,’ he recalls. Bezmozgis also feels that they were attracted to the story. ‘[They] wanted to be involved in something that was actually meaningful to them. It was a combination of a horrible financial production situation and people attracted to a story they don’t normally get to work on.’