Last time Jason Raftopoulos spoke to Neos Kosmos, he was ready to bring his film West of Sunshine to the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, after already having it screened in Venice. Almost one year later, the film has made the round of some of the most significant film festivals in the world, coming back home for the Melbourne International Film Festival a few weeks ago. Now, it’s time for its official theatrical release and Raftopoulos is savouring the moment.

“It’s been amazing,” he says, looking back at how things have rolled out these past 12 months.

“We feel, as a team, so blessed that the film has been seen by so many people around the world. We’re just grateful that the film has had a life outside of our own world.”

Making the rounds of the film festivals has been enlightening, giving him the opportunity to get feedback from all kinds of people.

“I had this incredible experience in Sydney where a man, whose wife had brought him to the screening, got up during the Q & A at the end and said: ‘That boy in the film was me, 25 years ago, with my own father; thank you for putting my story out there.’ I was completely blown away.”

West of Sunshine is based on Raftopoulos’ 2011 short film Father’s Day; it depicts one day in the life of a gambling addict father, Jim (Damien Hill) and his son Alex (Ty Perham) as they travel through Melbourne while Jim tries to find $15,000 to pay back the dangerous loan shark Banos (Tony Nikolakopoulos).

“I was really pleased that people have been seeing something in this story that is so close to home for me and that they are understanding, not even in an intellectual level, but in a deeply felt manner,” says the director.

“I hope more audiences get to experience it.”

The film may have been shot in Melbourne in just 18 days, but its story is longer.

“The characters have been growing for a long time,” he says.

“You work with other projects as you go, but this one was always somewhere in my psyche and I knew it needed to come out.”

The theme of the film is a father’s responsibility, but also addiction, surrender and time – “in the sense of what we do with it, when it comes to family and our children”.

These are things that pretty much everyone can relate to, even if they have not been directly affected by the darkest parts of the film’s narrative. Even so, the story of a working class father struggling with addiction, debt and fatherhood, comes as a stark reality check regarding Australia’s status as a ‘lucky country’ and particularly Melbourne’s status as one of the world’s ‘most liveable cities’.

“I find these platitudes to be quite disturbing, because they kind of negate any potential price that we pay for the things that we have,” he says.

“I feel incredibly grateful that I live in a fantastic country and I do love that, but I want to be very careful in navigating these questions because we have people who are going through hard times and are not necessarily given attention. I think people work really hard because things are really expensive, and we have to ask why are things that way. That is one of the things I think about; it’s nice to have nice things, but at what cost?”

West of Sunshine does not answer this question, but it contributes to a dialogue about the challenges that our society faces.

“One of the things you try and do as a filmmaker is without pushing anything down anyone’s throat – which I don’t like at all – in a subtle way you kind of show personal journeys of characters,” explains Raftopoulos.

“By doing that, even in a small subtextual way, that creates a dialogue between yourself and the audience and hopefully between the audience themselves. By even creating the dialogue you’re kind of shifting the marker in that way you might be doing something to contribute to the dialogue. So the film becomes kind of a commentary on this structure of capitalism that we have. That’s fine, that’s the best thing that we have come out, we can’t think of anything better at the moment, but there are tensions within that and I want to explore those things.”

Damien Hill and Ty Perham in 'West of Sunshine'.

Now that West of Sunshine is coming full circle from the festival circuit and is out in cinemas, Raftopoulos is ready to let it continue its course and focus on his next project, which he describes as “a crime story with a bit of an edge”. What is the appeal of stories about people falling off the tracks?

“Good question,” he answers, laughing. “Even going back to ancient literature, even back to Homer, all the characters are trying to address something within themselves,” he says.

“The characters embark on a journey, they have questions they need to be answered in themselves. I think that this is part of growth, of evolution. I’m not saying that every character in every film has to change, and they don’t, but I like the idea of a character study; it’s what I like to explore.”

In a way, this “humanistic point of view” is an influence of his experience growing up Greek.

“Some of the first readings I ever did was Greek mythology,” he remembers.

“One of the first books I was given was a kid’s version of mythology, which had a map of all the gods. I remember looking at it and trying to find out who’s related to who and what those stories were. I found that fascinating. These stories speak about different parts of the human condition; it is an incredible gift to our humanity that we have these stories, that they still exist today, and in a way and have been retold thousands of times over and over, given different context. There is something completely universal in these stories and ideas continue to tell the struggle of people today.”

Watch the trailer for ‘West of Sunshine’ below: