“The human brain wants a narrative,” Elliot Greenebaum said of his new movie, “Assisted Living,” which began as a graduate student’s cerebral exploration of nursing-home life. His professors urged him to make the project more accessible to viewers. “They kept saying, ‘What can we do to make this more narratively compelling?'” Mr. Greenebaum recalled.

The 27-year-old director now admits his naivete: “I had these visions of changing cinema forever,” he said. Much like his fellow film students at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Mr. Greenebaum aspired to make it big on the big screen. But unlike the majority with widescreen dreams, his vision came true.

“Assisted Living,” opens at Village East Cinema today on the heels of a run earlier this month at the Angelika Film Center on Houston Street.

The film was shot during the summers of 2000 and 2001 at the Masonic Home in Louisville, Kentucky, an eldercare facility in Mr. Greenebaum’s hometown. He cast professional actors and coopted the home’s staff to perform bit parts. “Assisted Living” trails a fictional 21-year-old pot-smoking janitor named Todd, a role taken on by actor Michael Bonsignore. Playing opposite him is 80-year-old actress Maggie Riley as plucky resident Mrs. Pearlman. The film marks Ms. Riley’s debut as a leading lady: her only prior screen credit was as an extra in “Moonstruck.” The actress was also member of a circus, who, in her salad days, hung by her teeth from a trapeze.

Todd engages in a series of rather mean-spirited pranks – including, but not limited to, calling up the home’s residents and pretending to be their dead family members telephoning from heaven. Ultimately, though, he forms a bond with Mrs. Pearlman.

Mr. Greenebaum, a baby-faced Brooklynite who arrived for his interview wearing jeans, vintage Adidas sneakers, and an oversized gray knit shirt and toting a skateboard, traces his fascination with the elderly to his own family dynamic.

“My parents are really old,” said Mr. Greenebaum. (His mother is 68 and his father is 74.) “The film is really a translation of a mother-son story – the son character feels a certain level of ambivalence about taking care of the mother, but as they slip further and further into fantasy, they resolve the conflict.”

Mr. Greenebaum began work on the feature in 2000, while at Tisch. It was initially a 10-minute short about a woman who gives her son a model plane for Christmas, then finds herself alone in a wheelchair in a nursing home, fixated by airplanes. Instructors at NYU were dubious of this early incarnation.

Frustrated by the critical response, Mr. Greenebaum decided to take some time off from school and moved back to Louisville to create a masterpiece. A year later, he had created an extended version of the short, which he refers to as “a two-hour, avant-garde piece of crap.” So he packed his bags and went back to Kentucky for a second consecutive year, to expand the storyline connecting Todd to Mrs. Pearlman.

Mr. Bonsignore was unenthusiastic about having to leave his East Village apartment to spend another summer at a Louisville nursing home.

“The first time, he thought it was kind of romantic,” said Mr. Greenebaum. “The second time, it was out of a moral obligation to me.”

Even after the movie was shot and edited, there were a few hitches. “Assisted Living” won the award for best fictional picture at the 2003 Slamdance Film Festival (a smaller alternative to the Sundance Festival), after which it was purchased by Cowboy Pictures, a New York based distribution company. When Cowboy folded later that year, Mr. Greenebaum frantically searched for a new distributor. He finally connected with Jeff Lipsky, an independent distributor formerly of October Films and Lot 47 Films, in June 2004.

After kicking off in New York and Washington, D.C., “Assisted Living” will open in six cities in Kentucky. Florida, Texas, Michigan, and Ohio will follow. Mr. Greenebaum also submitted the feature to NYU as his master’s thesis; it was accepted, and he graduated in December.