You get the sense, talking to her, that nothing's going to slow Mangla Bansal down for long.

On the phone from Toronto, her voice is charged with enthusiasm.

"I'm so excited you called!" she announces.

She's eager to share her story with the folks back home - yes, this filmmaker-on-the-go in the big city is a self-described "born and bred Burnaby girl," and she still considers Burnaby home.

Bansal has plenty of reason for enthusiasm these days, since her short film Sindoor is opening the 2010 Vancouver Asian Film festival Nov. 4.

It's not the first honour for the film. It has also been screened at festivals in L.A., Miami, Ireland and Honolulu, where it captured a Golden Kahuna Award for excellence in filmmaking. It was nominated for four 2010 Leo Awards, honouring the best in British Columbia Film.

Bansal also captured a 2009 City of Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award for Emerging Artist in Film and New Media.

She admits it's nice to get the recognition, especially with the long road she travelled to get the film made.

Bansal says her career in the film industry really had its roots in her high school experiences at Burnaby Central, when she was active in human rights causes. It was that interest in human rights that first led her to Capilano to study film, first in feature film and then in a new documentary program. As part of her studies, she travelled to India, where she shot a short documentary. She later put together another documentary on her grandmother.

The future was looking pretty promising - and then the film industry in Vancouver went pretty much dead.

"When the industry went into hiatus, I had to do something on my own," Bansal says.

It was January 2009, and she had just finished up some work with the National Film Board. Finding herself without immediate work, she sat down at her computer to write. The film, about a young Indo-Canadian woman's search to find peace after losing the love of her life in a car accident, is based on a true-life event that Bansal was witness to while vacationing in India. The story tumbled around in her head, she says, until she sat down and gave voice to it.

Then she set about the process of trying to find the money to make it happen, sending off applications for funding while at the same time searching for all the necessary ingredients - cast, crew, locations.

She had everything in place, and then the funding rejections started. She heard one "no" after another until, with everything in place to start filming, she finally received her last rejection.

"Once I got that 'no,' I was in shock," she admits. "I was like, I have the locations in place, I have the crew in place."

What she needed was the money to pay for the camera and lighting equipment. She didn't pause for long.

"I just thought I should suck it up," she says.

So she poured all her personal savings into the project and filmed anyway.

She was fortunate, she notes, that she got an experienced cast and crew to volunteer their time - many of whom were happy to work at all, given the state of the film industry at the time. Many of them found Bansal simply through word of mouth about the project.

She's thrilled at the calibre of people who came to work on Sindoor - not the least of them Leo Award-winning actor Balinder Johal, who recently starred in Deepa Mehta's Heaven on Earth and who plays the mother of the lead character, Megha (Zara Durrani).

Bansal herself served as writer, director and producer - a combination of hats she's not in a hurry to wear again any time soon, she admits with a laugh. She also produced the music, a new rendition of an old hymn in the Sikh holy book, the Sri Guru Granth Sahib.

The end result is an eight-minute short that she hopes serves to open doors for her in the film industry.

"I like to call this my calling-card film," she explains.

She hopes this film gives her the credibility to move on and find funding for other projects - including a feature film she wrote earlier this year.

In the meantime, she's spending a lot of her time on marketing for Sindoor. As is commonly accepted in the film industry, she notes: "Making a film is 10 per cent of the job, getting it out to people is 90 per cent."

She's also busy doing a variety of work in Toronto - some for a documentary production company, some for CTV, some on various television projects.

What the future will bring, she's not sure. For now she's content to "go with the flow."

"I have no idea what tomorrow holds," she says. "My dreams can change in a flash."

For more on Bansal, see www.ramkaliproductions.com.

The Vancouver Asian Film Festival runs Nov. 4 to 7 at Cinemark Tinseltown Theatre in Vancouver. Check out www.vaff.org/festival for all the details.