Halifax: Local product Chaz Thorne will be the star of the Atlantic Film Festival’s opening weekend. The Haligonian hyphenate produced and cowrote Clement Virgo’s Poor Boy’s Game and coproduced, wrote and directed Just Buried, his feature helming debut. Both will screen at the fest.

‘It was action-packed,’ says the 32-year-old, recalling his two-movie production cycle last year. ‘That’s what you want it to be. I feel insanely fortunate to have two films go in one year. I feel insanely fortunate to have one film go.’

Thorne is Bridgewater, NS-born and Halifax-bred, both sides of his family having lived on the Atlantic coast for generations. He trained as a classical actor at the National Theatre School of Canada, graduating in ’96. Inspired by a playwriting teacher, he turned to writing to make a living, as he found nothing he liked being produced in theater. ‘There was nothing that spoke to me as a young man,’ he recalls.

As he wrote and produced his own work for the stage, he also found roles in film and TV, and took to directing the short comedic pieces Table Dancer and One-Hit Wonder for the CBC, which gave him the leverage to move into features.

Poor Boy’s Game follows the dramatic tale of a white ex-con (Rossif Sutherland) who gets involved in a boxing match with a vengeful opponent, and who is coached by the black father (Danny Glover) of a boy whom he severely beat years earlier – the very reason for his incarceration. Just Buried, meanwhile, is a dark comedy about an inadvertent mortician (Jay Baruchel) and his assistant (Rose Byrne), who take to killing people to boost business.

Thorne says the two films have nothing in common in terms of inspiration.

‘The only thing that inspires me to write is a good story, then the genre becomes self-apparent,’ he explains. ‘In both cases, what I had was a really good story, but they are drastically, drastically different films.’

Having these films premiere at TIFF is obviously a huge deal, but one gets the impression Thorne’s just as thrilled about their screenings in his hometown – a city, he says, that is close to his heart.

‘It shows in my work and shows in the fact that I live here,’ he says. ‘I could live somewhere else, but this is where I choose to live and raise my family.’