LA GRANDE — “Breakup Season,” the romantic drama filmed entirely in La Grande in 2023, is coming back to the city — it’s the featured attraction Friday night at the Eastern Oregon Film Festival.

And after that, the movie is hitting the road: writer-director H. Nelson Tracey says “Breakup Season” has struck a deal for a limited theatrical release in November in a half-dozen cities — with the likelihood that more will be added.

A theatrical run La Grande after the festival is a strong possibility.

“I’m trying to get hold of the Grenada Theatre in La Grande,” Tracey said in an interview Friday, Oct. 11, a week before the movie takes the spotlight at the Eastern Oregon Film Festival. (See the sidebar story for details about the Friday showing.)

The weeklong runs in cities such as Los Angeles begin on Friday, Nov. 15 (although the movie actually will debut in Los Angeles on Thursday, Nov. 14).

The idea, Tracey said, is to build awareness of the film before it makes its video-on-demand debut, which now is planned for December.

He said the timing was important because the film takes place in the holiday season.

“It’s a Christmas movie,” Tracey said. “I couldn’t miss the opportunity to release it this Christmas.”

In “Breakup Season,” a young man, Ben (Chandler Riggs, best-known for “The Walking Dead”), brings his girlfriend Cassie (Samantha Isler, from “Molly’s Game”) to his rural Oregon town (portrayed in the movie by, well, La Grande) to meet his parents. It doesn’t go well, and the two decide to break up.

And then a raging storm shuts down travel. Cassie is stuck with her newly minted ex and his family until the end of Christmas.

If you think this sounds like the setup for a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie, Tracey concedes the point.

But he wants to go a little deeper with “Breakup Season.”

“If you are a fan of Hallmark films, you will enjoy” the movie, he said, “but it will completely subvert your expectations.”

And that kind of subversion mirrors the development of “Breakup Season” — which Tracey originally dubbed “Dumped at Christmas.”

“When I first came up with this idea, I thought, ‘Oh, a breakup during Christmas and they’re stuck. Hilarity ensues.’ … As I started really writing it, I realized pretty quickly that breakups in my life, in my experience, are not very funny. So I reframed it in my mind and said, ‘OK, I’m going to take the breakup stuff seriously and just tell it straight.'”

The final result, he said, strikes “a really nice balance of comedy and drama,” and the movie has pleased crowds at film festivals across the nation.

Tracey first encountered the Eastern Oregon Film Festival in 2019, when it showed a short documentary he had made. Later, as part of a month-long residency sponsored by the festival, he worked on the script for “Breakup Season.” The 2022 festival included a staged reading of the script.

In the reading, he said, “We got a lot of feedback on how to make the script feel a little more localized — and a couple of pointed notes. And also, from a purely creative standpoint, hearing it read out loud and hearing … local actors do it was really fun.”

In addition, Nelson grew weary of calling the film “Dumped at Christmas.”

“I needed to say that title 1,000 times out loud, and to recognize it was a bad title, and it was a clunker. … It just wasn’t a good movie title. And then about a month later, I came to the title ‘Breakup Season,’ and it was like, immediately, yes, that’s it. … It rolls off the tongue in a way that the original title never did, and it still conveys what I wanted it to.”

The film was shot over three weeks in La Grande in February 2023. Nelson spent much of the rest of the year editing the film and tackling various post-production duties, which included lining up what turned out to be a busy season at film festivals.

The film debuted at the Desertscape Film Festival in St. George, Utah, where it picked up four awards, including best of the festival and best feature film.

“And that really set the tone for an amazing film festival run that we’re still on. … It’s just been electric to see it be well-received all over the country.”

And there’s an additional charge of electricity to bringing the movie back to La Grande, he said.

“So many people came to bat for this film,” Tracey said. “We really took over the town,” and the final product “shows the town in so many different ways.”

“Breakup Season” shows Friday, Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. at the McKenzie Theater on the Eastern Oregon University campus. A question-and-answer session with members of the cast and crew will follow the screening. Tickets are $15 and can be ordered at the website www.eofilmfest.com/festival-schedule/

For more on “Breakup Season,” see the Wednesday edition of Go! magazine in the print edition of the East Oregonian.