When Chandler Levack was in her late 20s, she spent a month in Montreal. She’d just ended a relationship, she was between jobs, and she had a friend who asked her to cat sit while he was away.

“For the first time in my entire life, I was going to take that month and write something that was just for me. I didn’t know where it was going to go, but I loved romantic comedies and I wanted to make something like that,” says Levack. “It was the first time I honoured the fact that I really wanted to make a feature film.”

Ten years later, with much further development, that screenplay has become Levack’s second feature, Mile End Kicks, which premieres at TIFF this year. Starring Euphoria actor Barbie Ferreira, it’s about a young woman who spends a summer in Montreal in the early 2010s, devoting herself to a creative project after a terrible time working at a music magazine in Toronto. “It’s crazy that it’s been a decade in the making,” Levack says.