As Katrin Bowen debuts her feature film Amazon Falls (pictured) at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Vancouver director is also shopping her next project, Off Course, as a potential Italian-Canadian co-production.

The suspense road movie has Roberto Bessi of Buskin Film attached as the Italian producer partner for the $3.5 million project.

Bowen wrote the script for Off Course, which is loosely based on her early Italian modeling days.

In the movie, a drugged-up, disillusioned model flees an Italian nightclub where she works as a dancer in a bid to get back to Canada to see her estranged and dying father.

After missing a bus, the young woman jumps into a car driven by an older man, who mistakes her as a prostitute. The misunderstanding soon turns into a kidnapping that takes the audience around the Italian countrywide.

Bowen told Playback Daily that Off Course is loosely based on an actual hitch-hiking incident in Italy when she was 19 years-old that ended without personal injury, but had her spending a frightening night in a hotel room with an older man with dark secrets that he looked to unburden himself with.

“He didn’t hurt me, but I sat in a hotel room watching him sleep, which was very terrifying,” she recounted.

Bowen expects to structure the Italian-Canadian co-pro with an Italian actor playing the older man, and a young Canadian actress as the young model in distress.

Amazon Falls, which Bowen directed and co-produced with Darren Reiter, is loosely based on her own experience as a struggling B-movie actress in Los Angeles.