CHARLOTTESVILLE (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) — For Richmond native Melody Roscher, screening her directorial debut in her home state was simultaneously exciting and nerve racking.

“It’s also very scary because nobody knows you as well as your community,” Roscher told Cville Right Now after Friday night’s screening of “Bird in Hand” at the Virginia Film Festival. “I think there’s a homecoming and an understanding when it comes to the audience. That’s exciting, but also there’s nowhere to hide.”

“Bird in Hand,” also written by Roscher, was filmed on location in Virginia.

Roscher was on hand for the screening along with the film’s producer, Saba Zerehi. Both participated in a discussion after the screening, moderated by RogerEbert.com’s Marya Gates.

Afterward, Roscher told Cville Right Now that she thought it was, “very crucial that Virginia to have a film festival like this.”

She went onto praise the festival’s programming, saying she wished she could see every film, and commented on how each films she’s been to has been sold out.

“It’s keeping a medium alive,” she said, “and the only way that crafts people can exist is if their medium’s kept alive, so it’s critical. I love this festival.”

Her film follows Bird, a recently engaged woman living in New York City who returns to stay at her mother’s home in Virginia while she plans the wedding. As the film progresses, the mother and daughter’s relationship begins to deteriorate as old wounds and new revelations begin to resurface.

Roscher had previously made a name for herself in the film industry as a producer. In the post-screening discussion, she said she went into the industry just looking to support other filmmakers in telling great stories.

“I always wanted to write, I always wanted to direct,” she said, “and I feel like I got so much experience supporting other people’s visions that it told me a lot about myself as an artist, so when it came time to make this, I was just very excited to get the chance.”

As she wrote the film, Roscher said during the discussion she did a lot self-reflection, drawing from real-life experiences when crafting the narrative and characters, particularly Bird.

“With Bird, she got more complicated as I wrote her,” Roscher said. “It started with looking at my own struggles and failures and ways I felt I was just like limping through the world and she was born out of that.”

As she continued to draw from her life to craft the narrative, Virginia became the clear choice for where to set the movie. She had spent the first half of her life growing up in the Commonwealth, spending the second in New York.

“To conjure the images of where this character came from, it was all Virginia, of course,” she said. “It was the place where I was from, the place that built me.”

After the film, Roscher told Cville Right Now that she used to think she couldn’t be a filmmaker because she was from Virginia. But she has come to realize the unique perspective her peers don’t have.

“I just have a perspective that a lot of filmmakers that are in the mainstream festivals don’t have because they’ve been raised in one of a couple of extremely film-centric cities,” she said, “and that’s great. That’s awesome. But like anywhere else, it can be an echo chamber. So I’d like to say that I have a perspective that’s just slightly on the outside of that chamber.”