The resulting film, Galore – which debuted in Canberra on Thursday night and is to open nationally next week – is set in the days leading up to the 2003 bushfires.

Graham said he wanted to capture the feel of that time in Canberra, which for him meant long days spent around Kambah Pool and the Arawang Ridge.

“Even when I first wrote the script, it was very much set in the places that we filmed,” he said. “I think there’s a really cinematic quality to that Murrumbidgee corridor, and there’s a really beautiful light and a drifting, listless sense of the way, when we were kids, we would wander around that place.”

He said people were initially surprised that he was adamant about the Canberra setting, but he says the landscape was as important to the film’s narrative – a teen romance – as the characters themselves.

“There’s an indescribable quality around there that I haven’t really encountered in other places,” he said. “It’s a bit of the mix between the super-ordered streets and the concrete skate parks and then these sort of vast tracts of beautiful bushland, that strange little collision.”

And when the film was screened to audiences at the Berlin Film Festival last year, it was the film’s physical setting, as much as the characters and script, that had people talking.

“They were totally fascinated that what they felt were stories they could easily relate to were taking place in this weird, floating landscape that they didn’t recognise and was really unfamiliar,” Graham said. “People were also totally fascinated with the idea of the bushfires, the idea that cities in Australia are constantly being haunted by bushfires over the summer. I think that they found that totally bizarre and strange. It seems so familiar to us, but for an audience that’s so far away in the big cities, it’s quite dreamlike.”

He said he was curious to find out what Australian audiences made of the setting, as the film had little to do with the political centre of Canberra. But he was just as interested to see the reactions of Canberrans, especially those who were around in 2003.

“It’s really the days before – you see the fire at the very end but it’s really a sort of storytelling device that allows us to place it in the real world against a real set of events," he said. "I think everyone in Canberra has stories about the weeks around the fire.

“It’s so focused on the world of the kids, the fires are just a backdrop – it’s very much about the painful joy of growing up, and it’s always out of the corner of their eye, glimpsed over the ridge lines, that there are fires burning. It’s not really until the climax that the fire arrives.”