Although Littlerock centres on a pair of Japanese tourists unable to verbally communicate with the locals of a small Californian town, director Mike Ott (who will attend VIFF) says the story was largely inspired by the language barriers he faced while taking a previous film, 2006’s Analog Days, around the world. (The film screens on Tuesday and Wednesday [October 5 and 6].)

“When I went to Argentina with the movie, I met this girl,” he explained by phone from his home in Valencia, California. “She didn’t speak a word of English, except for hi and bye and I barely spoke any Spanish at all. We had this romance while I was there, in which we kind of figured things out by pointing at stuff. When we were together, we could kind of communicate. But, still, it was rough.”

Littlerock’s lead character, Atsuko (Okatsuka Atsuko), from Japan, becomes enchanted with the rundown town, whether she’s pounding beers at sketchy keg parties or taking in an oddball Fourth of July parade. Meanwhile, she struggles to converse with her possessive de facto host Cory (Cory Zacharia) and crush Jordan (Brett L. Tinnes).

“She really falls in love with this ideal American dream,” Ott said of Atsuko’s initial impressions. Despite falling for the U.S., she gets a different perspective on the country at a former internment camp in Manzanar, California, that imprisoned thousands of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. “Her going to Manzanar is this other side of America that we don’t even talk about much. Manzanar is something you briefly touched on in school. I didn’t even know much about it until we talked about going up there. Seeing all that shit blew my mind.”