“Some superstitions are for good reasons,” runs the tagline for a locally made independent film, The Blacksmith, premiering at Dendy on Friday: a ghost story (or is it?) spanning 180 years.

Audiences can expect an atmospheric film, with a dark hidden past that is slowly revealed, says director Steve Cooke (The Walk World), turned moviemaker after a 33-year career as a policeman. It is his first feature-length film, following the award-winning short, Letter from Bobeyan.

Eighteen months in the making, The Blacksmith tells the story of Jesse (Michael Slater) and Ella (Yanina Clifton), a policeman suffering from PTSD and his academic wife, who move from the city to a small country town to help him recover. On their new property is a blacksmith’s shed that has been locked up for 180 years. As Jesse turns his hand to blacksmithing, which he always wanted to try, strange things start to occur. Are they real, or are they inside his head? You won’t know until the end of the film what is actually happening, Cooke promises.

“The spark for the idea was with me,” he explains. “I was diagnosed with PTSD and left the police back in 2017. My wife thought it would be a good idea if we moved away from the city, and went to a town somewhere, and started a new life just to help me recover. But I didn’t want to be a burden on my family by doing that. So I put some strategies in place to help myself.

“One of those was bushwalking. And as I walked, I came up with lots of ideas for stories that I could potentially make into films. Having never made a film, of course, it was a huge leap into that space. I pulled myself out of that dark space by bushwalking and writing scripts, and started to make films.”

His first film, Letter from Bobeyan (2021), filmed in Namadgi, was named Best Indie Short Film at the New York Movie Awards and best short international film at the Rocky Mountain International Film Festival. Based on true events from the 1850s, its beautiful Australian landscapes and sounds of native animals appealed to American audiences more than Australian ones, Cooke said.

“But that’s the way it goes.

“If a third of the audience love [The Blacksmith], a third of the audience are indifferent, and a third don’t like it, I’m pretty happy with that, to be quite honest.”

After the Dendy screening, Cooke will enter The Blacksmith in some of the bigger global film festivals. The film will move onto Vimeo (pay per view) in March 2023.

The Blacksmith was filmed on a shoestring budget, Cooke says.

“We don’t have the luxury of having the big ticket CGI effects, so we’ve had to make do with some traditional film-making methods, to be creative with our camera angles, our lighting, and our times of day that we shoot.”

But a traditionally crafted, handmade approach is appropriate for a film about blacksmithing, after all.

Filming during the pandemic had its challenges, Cooke says.

“Right at the start of it, we needed to get one particular shot where there was a flowering wattle. That was right in the height of COVID. So, not knowing where everything was going to go with COVID, we had to go through a process of getting an exemption from ACT Health to actually film that very first scene. Things started to slowly ease in terms of COVID restrictions, so it allowed us to get back to filming.

“But the other challenges of course, were locations. This was a fairly expansive script in terms of the story. To find quality locations to do it justice was probably the biggest challenge early on.”

But Daughters at Hall allowed them to film at the café on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, while the owners of a Carwoola property provided the locale and materials to construct film sets.

“In a lot of ways, we got lucky; the planets aligned in terms of having that perfect location for the film or at least something that would do it justice.”

Cooke said he would not have been able to make the film without his cast and crew, particularly assistant director Erin Hyde, camera operator Maggie Shatrov, camera and sound assistant Brayden Clew-Proctor, and assistant producer Caleb Cooke. He was also fortunate to have his cast of young people, many of whom have been with him for five years now.

“When people turn up to this film, they see a finished product, but what they don’t see is the many, many months of hard work that went into it. Not just hard work in terms of filming, but getting ready to film, balancing lives and personal commitments, filming in the very hot summer and the freezing cold winters. Some scenes were night shots in the middle of winter. We got pretty cold, and it was a hard slog.”

Cooke’s next project will be a 45-minute adaptation of Stephen King’s short story, Dedication. He was a big fan of the author when he was a teenager, and the influence has stayed with him.

“I’d like to say I don’t purely make ghost stories or supernatural thrillers, but I certainly seem to be headed in that direction with my writing.”

Cooke dreamt of being a filmmaker since he was in year seven. While he is late coming to the industry, he believes Canberra is perfect for independent filming.

“No matter where you look, there’s a location, whether you want to have that capital city atmosphere or film down by the lake. There’s so much natural beauty here that it makes it really easy to be inspired to create stories. So much diversity in such a small city offers filmmakers that opportunity to make whatever story they want using those many, many locations as their inspiration. And the people are pretty good, too! Generally, they’re very accepting,” he says.

“It’s really important to support the Canberra film-making scene – there are some terrific independent filmmakers in Canberra, and there are some terrific stories that are coming out of independent filmmakers. If people could come and support that industry, it will just get better and better knowing that the people are behind us, and it will lead to bigger and better things for everyone.”

The Blacksmith screens at Dendy Cinemas Canberra, Civic, on Friday 25 November: function begins at 6pm, screening at 7pm; mature audiences only. Tickets available from Eventbrite.