Mining his own troubled childhood, debut feature filmmaker Glendyn Ivin tells the haunting and poetically moving tale of an errant father and the impact that his rugged ways have on his innocent son in Last Ride.

The line between truth and fiction can be a fine one. Just ask Glendyn Ivin. As a young boy growing up in Tamworth in rural NSW, he could never have known that seminal childhood moments and the effects of an absent, emotionally closed father would so poignantly inform and direct his creative adult life.

Fast forward to 2003, when Ivin won the Palme d'Or for Best Short Film at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival for Crackerbag. For Ivin, it was more than just a film about the anticipation of firecracker night. The film contained "a ridiculous amount of detail about my own childhood," says the filmmaker. Crackerbag was about a child and a father, and an absent one at that.

Flash forward to 2009, and a pattern is firmly in motion with the imminent release of Ivin's feature debut, Last Ride, a story about the complex relationship between a father and son. In demand after his Cannes victory, Ivin had sifted through several scripts on his way to his first feature. He turned them all down. "The hardest thing to find in a script is something that resonates with you, and something that speaks directly to you," says Ivin from his day job in Melbourne where he works as a director of commercials. "It has to be something that you'll do everything for, for however long, to see it made. I was writing my own script when Last Ride arrived, and it just spoke directly to me. I fell in love with it. I knew that I could make it my own."

In Last Ride, hardened, small time felon, Kev (Hugo Weaving), and his ten-year-old son, Chook (Tom Russell), are on the run from the law after Kev commits a violent crime. As the pair travel to locales from Kev's past, their already fragile, volatile bond is at risk of breaking. Kev struggles to resist the violent example set by his own father, and Chook is faced with an unimaginable moral dilemma. "What do you do about a dad that you love who you know is bad, and who does everything that you've been told is wrong?" says the film's co-producer, Antonia Barnard (The Quiet American, The Painted Veil), from her Sydney office. "How do you deal with that while still being able to love him?"

Last Ride, however, may never have been made were it not for the impact of Ivin's complex relationship with his father - at least not with the same director and certainly not in its current form. "My dad left home when I was five, but before and after he left, he was always emotionally distant," says Ivin, never hinting at any bitterness as he discusses the issue. "He's similar to Kev - he had terrible parents, and was left with very little emotional instruction on how to be a parent himself. He's made every effort to make amends over the years, and I respect him for that. But it's one of the things that I was very interested in looking at in the film: the cyclical nature of parents and children. Do children of bad parents have to grow up to be bad parents themselves?"

Ivin first read an early draft of the script about five years ago. He'd recently become a father for the first time, which added a whole new dimension to his connection with the story. The director thought that he'd come to terms with his father's desertion, but the birth of his son caused him to realise how deeply it had affected him. "I was feeling inadequate," he explains. "I was thinking, 'How do I be a dad? I don't know because I didn't really have a dad.' I'm still really determined five years on that I will definitely be a better dad than what my father was to me. A lot of people feel like that. Even if you've had really good parents, you always want to try and be better than them. It's definitely what resonates with me in the film. I think it will resonate with other people as well."

You could be forgiven for thinking that Ivin wrote the screenplay himself, such is his personal bond to the story. In fact, Last Ride is inspired by the 2004 novel of the same name by author Denise Young. Co-producer Nicholas Cole had bought the film rights at manuscript stage, and was attracted to the cinematic potential of the moral dilemma confronting Kev and Chook. Screenwriter Mac Gudgeon (The Delinquents) extended the story dramatically, with the original source material tailing off half way through the film's events.

As he did in Crackerbag, Ivin has infused seminal events from his own childhood into the story. "It's weird, because in the end I kind of forget what was in the book, what was in the script, and what I put into it," muses Ivin. "Even the scenes that have nothing to do with my childhood are still instilled with my own experience. This is the only way that I could direct the film. I always had to find my own take on things. It's definitely from my heart."

Last Ride is released on July 2.