When celebrated Perth theatre-maker Zoe Pepper set out to make her debut feature film she didn’t have to look too far from home — or, more precisely, the home that so many of her generation crave but is heartbreakingly out of their reach.

Pepper, In Birthright, tells the story of recently laid-off Cory (Travis Jeffrey) and his heavily pregnant wife Jasmine (Maria Angelico) who are evicted from their rental and forced to stay with Cory’s well-heeled boomer parents Richard (Michael Hurst) and Lyn (Linda Cropper).

When Cory and Jasmine extend their stay and Cory asks his dad for money, Richard pushes back, reminding him that he used the $10,000 given to him by his father to buy the house they’re in while Cory used the $10,000 Richard gave him to travel and get an arts degree.

Thus begins an increasingly surreal inter-generational clash, with the millennial son eying the home he believes is his birthright — he even starts digging up the pool that Richard filled in because it was too expensive to run — and the boomer patriarch digging in his heels, determined not to be pushed out of the leafy kingdom he spent his lifetime building.

Pepper says that Birthright was inspired by her fear that she would never realise the dreams of home-ownership that had been nurtured in her while growing up.

“When you’re young you have a vision of what your life is going to look like that you’ve internalised from your parents, which in this country involves owning your own home,” Pepper tells me over coffee at Vin Populi in Fremantle ahead of CinefestOz, where Birthright is getting its WA premiere.

“Then you get into your late 30s and you begin to realise, ‘It’s not going to come true’. I’m sure it is not unique to my generation, but it feels like the situation is on steroids.”

And it is not just owning a home, says Pepper. Even renting is a problem in this booming real estate market.

“I know a lot of people around my age who were forced to move back in with their parents, especially since the pandemic. It was supposed to be temporary, but lingered on longer than they expected. It is a situation that tests everyone’s patience,” she says.

Pepper used her own experience in the housing market and that of her family and friends to a comedy-drama about two generations occupying one space, with the children desperate for independence yet having to rely on parents for help and the parents having to jeopardise their retirement because of the perceived failure of their children.

“The more I pulled at the threads, the more I started to see this tussle as a microcosm of what’s happening more broadly between the generations — that millennials are trying to succeed at life in the same way that their parents did, but society has changed so radically that that kind of success is no longer attainable,” says Pepper.

“The millennial experience is shaped by precarity — in work, in housing, and I think there’s a lot of shame wrapped up in that. There’s a pervasive feeling of failure which is heightened in the context of the family home — because you’re not making your parents proud and the flipside of this is the palpable disappointment that the parents feel because their kid hasn’t amounted to much.”

While the setup for the movie — embattled children, unfeeling parents — could have pushed Pepper into the terrain of the very fashionable genre of “elevated” horror (Get Out is the most famous example) Pepper has aimed for a more balanced piece, affording both sides in the eternal generational battle equal amounts of humanity and motivation.

“It was important for me for the story to be even-handed. I wanted the audience’s alliances to keep shifting. I didn’t want it to be a battle between good and evil. It is a hallmark of all my work — characters who have real complexity. You are horrified by them at the same time as understanding where they are coming from,” says Pepper.

“We absolutely didn’t want to demonise the baby boomers. They made the best of their situation. The bigger enemy is the idea of generational exceptionalism — that boomers worked harder and longer than the generations that came after which is why they have wealth. The chasm of misunderstanding between the generations is the heart of the movie.”

While Birthright sounds like a conventional clash-of-generations drama — Pepper cites Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as an inspiration — it has an offbeat quality that can be traced back to her association with the envelope-pushing Perth theatre company The Last Great Hunt.

“All of my work on stage and in film has a sense of playfulness. I use a heightened style of storytelling because I want the audience to always be aware of the conceit. I’m not very interested in naturalism,” explain Pepper, who cites David Lynch and Paul Thomas Anderson amongst her influences.

“I also want my films to be entertaining even though I am exploring the impact of the housing crisis on a family, I like to say that my style is high-brow wrapped in low brow. I’m always looking for a more interesting way to represent real life,” says Pepper.

Entertainment and, in particular, humour is so important to Pepper that when Birthright had its world premiere at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival she worried that Americans would not get the jokes.

“I was anxious that the humour would not translate but it absolutely did. The housing crisis is across the globe, so they identified with the situation. They saw themselves reflected in Cory and Jasmine and have already had the conversation with their parents.”

Birthright is getting its Western Australian debut this week at CinefestOZ, where it is competing for the $100,000 CinefestOz Film Prize, one of the world’s richest.

Pepper will be up against fellow West Australian Zack Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead, a zombie thriller about an American woman (Daisy Ridley) who after an US weapon of mass destruction turns a half a million people into zombies goes looking for her missing husband.

“Hilditch’s command of the material is impressive, and the results feel as big as Hollywood . . . giving George Miller a run for his gas-guzzling money as one of the most ambitious Australian directors working today,” writes critic Stephen A. Russell when We Bury the Dead received its Oz premiere earlier this year at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

The two local entrants will be competing again Songs Inside, a documentary about a music program inside the Adelaide Woman’s Prison that won the $20,000 prize for its category at the Sydney Film Festival; and One More Shot, a time-travel rom-com about a young woman (Emily Browning) is given multiple extra chances at love when the combination of Y2K (it is set on New Year’s Eve in 1999) and a bottle of tequila send her tumbling into her past.

CinefestOZ is now under way in Busselton and other locales across the region. It climaxes on Saturday night when the winners of the Film Prize are announced and ends on Sunday. Go to the website for details and bookings.