Filmmaker Serhat Caradee has made it his mission to put multi-cultural Australia on the big screen in a dynamic cinematic way with his feature film directorial debut Cedar Boys.

Back in 2002, the AFTRS produced short film Bound started doing the rounds of film festivals in Australia and abroad. At barely eight minutes length, it was plain to see, for anyone who cared to look for it, that the filmmaker of this tight thriller had the vision lacking in most feature films, made in Australia or otherwise. Whip-cut to 6 years later, and we're knocking on the door of an inner-city Sydney house, about to interview Serhat Caradee, the director of Bound and the writer/director of Cedar Boys, his feature film debut.

"I did a lot of corporate films," Serhat says when asked the obvious question: where have you been all of this time? "I did a video clip, a TV pilot. I travelled for about two years to film festivals with Bound. I think it was in about 30 festivals. It was one of those short films that actually made money."

And it was one of these festivals that inspired Serhat to put pen to paper for Cedar Boys.

"What really triggered it was that I was about to go to New York for a film festival. I started watching films about New York and I thought I'd watch Mean Streets. I'd seen it before but I thought I'd watch it again. And then when I was over there people kept saying, 'oh you're from Australia, Crocodile Dundee, Mad Max and things like that,' and I thought, nothing has left our shores that shows our multiculturalism, our kind of outsiders. Mean Streets is about outsiders. People living on the fringes of the city, not really fitting in, that create their own world."

Cedar Boys follows three Australian-born Lebanese men in their early to mid twenties caught between three cultures.

"They have the home culture - religion, family heritage, gatherings and that's all good and strong," starts Serhat. "Then when they leave home and they're at school or at sport on the weekends and there's that competitiveness, the Aussie identity they have to relate to. And there's the third culture which they've adapted from American hip hop - that's the cars, the jewellery, the clothes, the lingo. Somewhere between all three, depending on where they are and who they're with, each is caught between these three cultures."

The film stars Les Chantery (Pitch Black, the upcoming Righteous Kill starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino), Waddah Sari (the TV show Dangerous) and newcomer Buddy Dannoun as the three leads, with support from Martin Henderson (The Ring), Daniel Amalm (Underbelly) and Rachael Taylor (Transformers). According to Serhat, one of the main themes of the film is "the choices you make when you're young have ramifications for you later on. These kids make stupid choices during the film somewhere and they pay the consequences at the end."

Suffice it to say that there are no posters for Crocodile Dundee in Serhat's warehouse-style abode. Instead, the walls are lined with Kieslowski, Scorsese, Coppola and more obscure films from Turkey, which is where Serhat's family arrived from when he was just an infant. Initially aiming to become an actor, Serhat studied acting for five years and then worked in theatre, film and TV, but found the work drying up. "I'm not sure if it was my height, my background, whatever, I just wasn't getting the roles," says Serhat. "I started doing plays, and putting myself in plays and I remember my girlfriend at the time said 'why don't you make a couple of short films and apply to film school?' I did, I made like two in six weeks and I got in."

At film school, apart from getting his hands on film equipment, Serhat met various people he continues to collaborate with, and also learnt about film history. His passion for cinema is contagious as the motor-mouthed auteur speaks passionately about his favourite films and filmmakers. When asked how old he is, Serhat enthusiastically answers 35. When followed up with a question about whether he's disappointed that he hadn't made his first feature film before that landmark, he sheepishly answers in the affirmative.

"That's a very personal thing actually. I am ten years behind my contemporaries, people like Mathieu Kassovitz and Steven Soderbergh. They all made their first features in their twenties! I think to myself, 'what did I do all those years? I mucked around clubs and cars and just crap for all those years. I just wish someone gave me a camera when I was young, like Spielberg and bloody David Fincher. When Cedar Boys gets released next year I'll be 36. From now on, as soon as I get a script I'm not going to waste time. I'm going to read scripts, go through an agent and start making films straight away. At least one film every 16 - 18 months from now on so that I can catch up."

Cedar Boys will be released in cinemas in 2009.