There was a flickering moment, in the dim, packed back room of Vermillion gallery on Sunday night, when it seemed that Grant Cogswell might fall down. Faint. Or walk out. Or start crying, or yelling, or just stand there and not say anything, forever. It was a nervous-making few seconds. Cogswell—standing in front of friends and family and colleagues and well-wishers and maybe just the morbidly curious—was delivering a fundraising pitch for his upcoming film project, Sebastopol (his first, with director Dan Gildark, since 2007's semidisastrous Cthulhu). Cogswell got a few words in, then paused for a long time, head down. ("It's been a long time since I talked in front of a crowd," he told me later. "I felt the floor opening up beneath me.") He pushed through. There was no collapse. All were relieved.

It's hard not to root for Cogswell, because dude is super-duper charming—and interesting, in a mad-scientist sort of way, and engagingly bare, in a just-mad sort of way. It's easy to understand how he gets people on board. You just like him. And Sebastopol ("a dark romantic comedy about a Boeing engineer who detours from a friend's wedding to rendezvous in Ukraine with a woman he has met on the internet") sounds like a fittingly odd and ambitious project (though not too ambitious—no fish monsters this time).

Set to film in Ukraine, with an impressive local crew (Ben Kasulke shooting, Etta Lilienthal designing), Sebastopol is adapted from the first-person account of a Seattle writer and filmmaker ("a friend of mine, who is not me," Cogswell insists) who went to Ukraine to find a wife and discovered that things are shitty in the "white third world." Cogswell, describing his initial conversation with this Ukrainian-bride-marrying friend, relayed a bunch of dubious shit, such as: "These people have nothing but their beautiful daughters," and that fine old chestnut about how courtship rituals + marriages + divorces = paying for sex, and dating is just like prostitution and all ladies are for sale anyway so arranged marriages for everyone because these women want to get rescued and so it's okay! Please.

I asked Cogswell to unpack those ideas a bit—where does he personally come down on the love-is-a-transaction spectrum?—and received the best speech ever: "I don't come down on it," he said. "I don't know where I stand. Listen. I have a bisexual past that will probably never be repeated and a heterosexual future that will probably never happen. I do know that male physical attraction is caused by the ability to produce a healthy child in a woman. And female attraction is based on whether that male is going to protect and provide for that child. And all the complexities and the romance between there and where we are in the West are a mystery." Sebastopol is about that. recommended