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PUDGE, the story of a 12-year-old girl who just wants a winter coat that fits her, may have been filmed in Toronto's Regent Park and the Wellesley area, but it's truly a Parkdale production.

From the 17-minute film's writer to its director, score composer and musicians, the creative minds that gave life to the film all hail from the city's west end, and now they are headed to the Toronto International Film Festival.

The story of a young girl who finds unexpected friendship on her quest for a new coat is one director Annie Bradley said is easily relatable.

"I think everyone has had a moment where they feel unempowered, where they feel invisible, where they just want to be loved and have friendship," Bradley said. "I think it's a very relatable, accessible film."

In a society where people are disconnected due to technology and socio-economic status, Bradley said she had always wanted to make a film about connection and how powerful that can be. PUDGE, as written by Tina Cooper, is that dream realized.

Bradley, originally from Muskoka, moved to an apartment on Roncesvalles Avenue 25 years ago. Since then she's moved around, made her mark on the world of film and even showed at the Sundance Film Festival.

She moved back to the neighbourhood about two years ago. After working as a first assistant director on hundreds of movies, movies of the week, television series and independent Canadian features, one of the American directors she was working with offered her a bit of advice.

"They said, 'You're going to have to stop doing this if you want to be a director, because you are a director,'" she said.

There is a very divisive line in North America, Bradley said, between the people who are seen as technicians and the people who are seen as creative.

"It's like all art forms. I always believe that you can't deny the work, but I quit," she said. "I walked away without a safety net... and just started directing full time."

For the past eight years Bradley was able to make a living at it and in 2003 was chosen to attend Women in the Directors' Chair program, an intensive 17-day program at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

"It was a really remarkable process and it really reconfirmed for me that this is what I am supposed to be doing," she said.

She has directed more than 40 short films, music videos, documentaries and commercials,

But even though she was making a living at her trade, Bradley wanted to get back into an environment that was really focused on drama in order to make the transition into features and dramatic television.

A friend at the time, Tina Cooper, told Bradley she was applying to the Canadian Film Centre and suggested Bradley do the same. Both women got in.

The Canadian Film Centre is a five-month series of concentrated exercises with a group of directors, writers, editors and producers.

"It was really wonderful, it was this really sort of fertile, insane, creative bubble," she said.

That bubble wrapped up last December with a Short Dramatic Film program. All the students at the centre pitched their ideas and a jury selected five directors and their teams to move forward.

Bradley teamed up with Cooper and their script PUDGE went forward.

The story was an idea Bradley has had for years and she said when Cooper wrote the script, the essence of the story remained the same.

"The story changed quite a bit," Bradley said. "But in essence, the themes that I wanted to explore remained the same."

After playing in and managing some bands over the years, working in visual arts and film, Cooper started writing about four years ago.

Cooper actually wrote two plays for the Short Dramatic Film program. The other, Adam Avenger, was about a man living in a halfway house in Parkdale, where Cooper lives with PUDGE's score composer John Critchley.

"Annie had an idea about a young girl forming an unusual friendship with an older woman," Cooper said. "The script went through eight drafts and changed quite radically."

Cooper said she likes to write character-driven scripts, like is the case in PUDGE, and draws from her own experience, like her childhood days in the Church and Wellesley streets area.

"When I was a kid, the colour of skin didn't matter, but if you didn't wear the right clothes or listen to the same music, that mattered," Cooper said. "A lot of the Regent Park stuff came from my background."

At the end of the Short Dramatic Film program process, the five films were screened by the people who choose the films for the Toronto International Film Festival and PUDGE was the only one chosen for the film festival.

Both women said they are excited about the opportunity to show at TIFF.

PUDGE screens publicly on Thursday, Sept. 11 at 8 p.m. at the AMC #3 theatre at Yonge and Dundas, and again at the same theatre on Friday, Sept. 12 at 2:30 p.m. Visit www.tiff08.ca for more details on the festival.