AURORA | When Rob Christopher and a small army of compatriots set out in 1995 to begin working on a film, the Denver Film Festival was younger that most of the college-age crew.

Now two decades later, the 38th Denver Film Festival is hosting the world premiere of “Pause of the Clock,” the film Christopher started 20 years ago and only recently finished — “a living time capsule,” he puts it — with the help of online crowdfunding.

“I’m glad I didn’t really think about how long it would take,” Christopher said of the final steps needed to make it possible to show the film on a big screen after so many years.

Christopher, who grew up in Jefferson County, was 19 and studying film at Chicago’s Columbia College in November 1994 when he finished the first draft of the screenplay and began circulating it to friends and faculty.

Managing to round up $6,000, a cast, a crew and a 16mm camera, they started filming in Colorado in January 1995 and wrapping up in May 1996 after on-and-off shooting in the Centennial State and Chicago.

And for about 12 years, all that work sat in a closet, untouched. Christopher said that when he graduated from Columbia in 1997, the project “fell by the wayside” as he set out to begin post-grad life: a job, a paycheck and all the trappings.

“Wild college years when I aimed for the moon because I wasn’t old enough to know how whacked-out the whole enterprise was,” Christopher wrote in 2008 amid the assemblage of a rough cut of the film.

“To this day I still don’t know how I did it,” he continued. “I do know that it would be a hell of a lot harder to do now.”

Now 40 and working in Chicago as a writer and editor, Christopher has proven his earlier self wrong to some extent. In January, he launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the film’s completion. Six weeks and 116 backers later, the project amassed more than $15,000 for the effort, meeting its goal just an hour before Kickstarter’s deadline.

That money went toward color correction, sound design, making a digital print and getting the film submitted to film festivals such as DFF38. More than 6,000 feet of film negatives were sent for digital scanning, most of which were “in almost pristine shape,” Christopher said.

“Everyone is just thrilled to see it finally,” Christopher said of the cast and crew members who helped him create the film 20 years ago. “A lot of the actors have never seen anything (from it).”

The film focuses on a pair of college roommates who are making a film until one stumbles across the other’s diary, revealing secrets that threaten their relationship and collide with the narrative of the film within the film — creating “a fragmented reality,” as Christopher put it.

Christopher said the prospect of debuting the film at the Denver festival is “a real coup,” and that the unique timing of how “Pause of the Clock” came together has benefited it as a whole.

“I would like to think I honored the original spirit of the film we shot back then … it’s much better than any movie I could have made back then,” he said.

“Pause of the Clock”

Premieres at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 7, at the Sie FilmCenter, 2510 E. Colfax Ave. Denver. Ticket and festival pass prices vary. Visit www.denverfilm.org for details.

Other Colorado connections

The Denver Film Festival always does an admirable job of featuring homegrown talent in front of and behind the camera.

In addition to a host of “First Look” short film programs featuring young Colorado filmmakers, a fine assortment of locally connected documentary shorts screen at 11:30 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 7, and again at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 15, at the Sie Film Center.

Among them are “From Australia With Lov3,” featuring local environmental artist Bode Klein’s found-object creations in and outside of Melbourne, Australia; and “The Neighbours Project,” a 32-minute documentary by Denver artist Dylan Burr, who has chronicled homelessness across the metro area.