“You sure do tell a story sideways,” says Sheila at one point in Chusy Haney-Jardine’s wildly offbeat first feature Anywhere, USA. “Life don’t follow a straight line,” Sheila's friend replies.

No it doesn’t, a fact played to the max as the director chronicles that sideways life, specifically his own life, in what he calls an “autobiography told in three parts.” Born and raised in Venezuela, able to speak five languages, sporting an M.F.A. in directing from the American Film Institute, and now cheerfully residing in Asheville, N.C., Haney-Jardine decided to make Anywhere, USA as he watched his mother-in-law succumb to lung cancer. “She had just retired and was ready to really live,” he said. “And through conversations with her, I realized that all we leave behind are these memories. So I thought I better get going fast, and make something to honor the idea that you shouldn’t postpone life.”

The result is what Haney-Jardine described as “an extremely personal film, with all of my foibles,” although you might not know it when you see it. Told in three segments, the film follows a long list of quirky characters in a small town as they struggle with love, desire, betrayal, self-definition, angst, and a host of other issues. Tammy and Gene fall out of love, thanks in part to the Internet, a pistachio, penises, and an Arab man. In the meantime, 7-year-old Pearl wonders about the existence of the Tooth Fairy and Ralph reckons with the fact that he’s clueless about race.

You may ask yourself: How is this an autobiography? “It’s a fictional representation of absolute fact,” said Haney-Jardine. “Every character in the film is me, and the events represent events in my life in this giant composite.”

The filmmaker (or a significant part of his anatomy, anyway) makes an appearance, and the film was co-written with Haney-Jardine’s wife, Jennifer MacDonald, and features his daughter, Perla Haney-Jardine, an actress whose credits include Kill Bill: Vol. 2 and Spiderman 3. She’s the only real actor in the film. For the rest of the cast, Haney-Jardine used people he found on the street, in convenience stores, and at Asheville’s Wal-Mart. He claimed that the film was written in situ, as they shot scenes, but insisted that it was indeed written. “There is no improvisation in the film,” he said. So how did he get such strong performances from non-actors? “It’s a trick I learned from directing TV commercials, when I would cast people from the street, people who’d never done any acting before. Basically, you have to make the camera disappear by talking a lot while you shoot.”