Di Stasio is one of the half-dozen private sponsors who helped get the debut feature from Ruth Borgobello over the line. He is also, in a roundabout way, a significant character in the first official Italian-Australian co-production.

"I wrote his character before I met him," says 40-year-old Melburnian Borgobello. "I read an article about his passion for Italy, and I thought, 'this is the kind of guy I need against Marco, who will bring out his ego, push his buttons'."

Marco (Flavio Parenti) is the male lead in her romantic drama, set in Udine in the north-east of Italy. He is a chef in his early 30s, drifting after the unexpected death of his best friend. As he wallows in the space between what was and what will be, he meets a young Australian woman called Olivia (Maeve Dermody), restless in her marketing job and drifting towards relocating permanently to follow her design instincts. They find each other, just as he is being offered a job in Australia – at a high-end Italian restaurant called Di Stasio.

Originally, Borgobello says, though her restaurateur was inspired by Ronnie Di Stasio he wasn't so named. "I think he was Francesco."

Unaware of the inspiration, a friend in the restaurant business told her he thought Ronnie would love the project. He made a few calls, but with no luck. "And then we got a call from this friend saying, 'You'll never guess who I bumped into at the supermarket'."

Maeve Dermody as Olivia and Flavio Parenti as Marco in The Space Between, the first official Italian-Australian co-production. 

A meeting was arranged, and Borgobello was able to bring along her leading man – a rising heart-throb in his native Italy, who counts Woody Allen's To Rome With Love among his major credits – because he had been flown to Australia for the Portsea Polo by the event's sponsor, Peroni. "So I went to meet Ronnie in his back room at Di Stasio and he had a very emotional reaction to the film, and to Flavio – he cried – and so he came on board," she says. "I didn't change the script, I just changed the character's name."

Back to the source, you might say.

The story comes from a similar place. Borgobello met her husband, Davide Giusto, on a trip to Italy with her father when she was 22. He was a chef; she worked in marketing for a bank. The day they met, a close friend of his died and that loss hovered over the beginnings of their relationship. "It made both of us look very differently on life," she says.

The Space Between is a gently-paced adult drama that feels more European in many respects than Australian. Borgobello, whose father is from Gorizia, about 20 kilometres from Udine, fell in love with Italian cinema while studying film at VCA and always felt she might make a movie there. The co-production treaty between the countries, signed in 1996, seemed the logical basis from which to make that happen. Perhaps she should have taken a clue about the likely challenges from the fact no one else had taken advantage of it.

Ronnie Di Stasio had significant input into the film on-screen and off.

First, there was the small matter of the disappearing Italian economy. "We arrived in 2010 with the finance in place, thinking we were going to shoot it within the year. Then the financial crisis hit and the production company collapsed," she says. "I think my dad was a bit worried, thought maybe we were a bit crazy – we'd sold everything and went over there thinking it was all going to happen quickly, but it was the opposite."

The Italian government eventually came to the party with a 65 per cent contribution of a budget of €950,000. "That's what they thought was about right for a first film."

Borgobello says the Australian funding agencies "said the budget was far too low, but if we had increased it we never would have got it financed in Italy. So it was trying to work out 'how can we do it for the money we can realistically raise?' And in the end we decided to look for private finance here."

Tortuous though the process was, Borgobello has no doubt she'd do it again.

"In a heartbeat. Now we know how to make it work, we've got the documentation and contracting. It was a puzzle that was very difficult to configure, but now we've got it not just us but other producers can utilise it."

The Space Between screens at the Italian Film Festival, in Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane through September and October. Details: italianfilmfestival.com.au

Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin