“Sometimes a topic just chooses you and it’s impossible to look away. When that happens, you just have to approach the topic honestly and hope that others can find value in it.” Filmmaker Ben Coccio gave this explanation for choosing the theme of high school shootings for his first feature film, a fictional account of two teenagers planning and carrying out a deadly attack on fellow students.

The movie “Zero Day” was shot in mockumentary style, as if an editor had put together home movies from the shooters’ video diary. They introduce us to Andre (Andre Keuck) and Cal (Calvin Robertson), two cute teenagers who for inexplicable reasons decide to commit a murderous rampage followed by their own suicides at their high school on the first day the temperature reaches zero degrees. Their video diary is an attempt to provide others with an explanation of what they did (though not necessarily why they did it), an invitation to selected outlets to cover the event, an alibi for their families who knew nothing of their plans, and an opportunity to gain notoriety.

“The narrative presumption is that it was always the two kids filming, except at the end when the school security cameras and another camera came on the scene,” Coccio said during an interview at the Florida Film Festival. “He changes from the two characters that control the narrative to the end, where the narrative continues beyond his control.”

As you can imagine, Coccio had trouble finding a high school that would agree to let him film there due to the content of the film. Instead, he used a local university library for the final interiors and the exterior of a local high school for the exteriors for his $ 45,000 production in New Milford, CT.

The two stars, high school students Andre and Cal, actually knew each other even before auditioning for the roles, so they had a natural camaraderie, according to Coccio. Their real names are used for their characters in the film, and the actors are supported by their real families who play their fictional families. Also, although all but two of the scenes were written, the actors were allowed to use their own words as long as they kept the spirit of the original lines. These elements, along with the look and feel of home videos, combine to make “Zero Day” feel surprisingly real.

The film received many awards, including Grand Jury Award at the Atlanta Film Festival, Best Feature at the New Haven Film Festival, Best Feature at the Empire State Film Festival, and Best Narrative Feature. at the Florida Film Festival. “Zero Day,” which is now available on DVD, was also an official selection at the Raindance Film Festival, Deep Ellum Film Festival, Denver Film Festival, and Boston Film Festival.

“My goal was to show the dramatic and suspenseful qualities of these two characters as we watch them go ahead with their plans,” Coccio said. “It is a suspenseful, almost Hitchcockian medical history that is told without judgment or explanation. This is an astonishingly random and frightening situation in which most of the people involved are good people. These two guys are the anomalies.”