A documentary on Tower Hill photographer Richard Crawley, Volcano Man, opened the festival, while Warrnambool filmmaker Lachlan McLeod's film, Clean features in the festival's closing night gala on August 21.

"I think it's pretty rare you have two films from a small city like Warrnambool represented in the major festival," McLeod said.

"Especially with Volcano Man at Tower Hill, it's so central to the identity of people from this region."

Clean is about transgender woman Sandra Pankhurst, who was adopted into an abusive family and worked as a sex worker and drag queen "before finding solace in the most unlikely of professions" - trauma cleaning.

Her worker's cleaned up hoarder sites, meth labs, murder scenes, deaths and suicides.

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McLeod came across Ms Pankhurst through media coverage of her book The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in Death, Decay and Disaster and a Facebook post by SBS. He contacted her and as soon as they met the cameras were rolling.

"It was revealed that Sandra was intensely funny," McLeod said.

"She had a very kind of a morbid sense of humour which worked well alongside the line of work she was in.

"It turned out Sandra was at quite a pivotal point of her life and we felt that this justified making a feature film about it."

At the time, Ms Pankhurst, who died from pulmonary disease in June 2021 after a long battle, was also searching for her birth mother.

McLeod said the world of trauma cleaning was new to the film's crew.

"Some of them (cleans) were pretty intense," he said.

"We learnt through making this documentary there's hoarders everywhere but you can't tell from the outside of the house."

It took three-to-three-and-a-half years from late-2019 to put the film together which has screened in Texas, Edinburgh, New Zealand and Western Australia.

McLeod was studying at University of Melbourne where he met Louis Dai and David Elliott - none of them studied film but they later formed Walking Fish Productions.

In 2009, the trio bought "a really shi**y camera" and jetted off to India to try their hand at filming a documentary about student migration.

It was commissioned by SBS.

"That steamrolled into a few other projects leading to Clean, which is definitely our most professional film," McLeod said.

They've also filmed a documentary in Japan and are working on a film about a mine planned to be built in Papua New Guinea.

Clean screens at Warrnambool's Capitol Cinema on August 21 at 4pm.

"Come along if you can," McLeod said.

It is also being screened at various Melbourne venues and in Bendigo as part of the festival.

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