GUILDERLAND — It’s been a roundabout journey for Iskandar Abdullayev, to Guilderland and also to filmmaking.

He was born in Uzbekistan and earned a Ph.D. in cell biology before landing a biomedical research job in Albany and buying a home in Guilderland.

It took getting laid off and then trying out a job that bored him before he recognized his need to tell stories.

He first started putting scripts and stories on paper “so they could be quiet,” he said recently. “Once you get them on paper, they just live their own life.”

His boss asked what it was that he was always writing on at work, and Abdullayev told him. Far from being angered or offended, the boss decided to give Abdullayev seed money to see one of the scripts through to production.

Abdullayev likes his adopted home town of Guilderland so much that he made it part of the pen name — Alex Guilderland — that he uses for all of his creative work.

His first short film, “This Is Andromeda,” which will soon make the rounds of the film-festival circuit, was screened Monday night at the Guilderland Public Library. Abdullayev and several members of the cast and crew were on hand to answer questions from the audience.

The film is a smart and stylish sci-fi thriller. The story, Abdullayev says, is about “confusion and parallel universes.”  

The story started, he said, from a joke that is common among scientists, the filmmaker said. “You remember when they were launching the Hadron Collider?” he asked. “There were concerns, legitimate concerns,” he said, “that they [the scientists] would generate a black hole that would gobble up everything.”

The joke, he said, is that “every 15 billion years, scientists launch the Hadron Collider.”

In other words, the universe is destroyed, the Big Bang happens, and evolution creates scientists again.

In the film, a father and his young daughter are waiting for the mother, who is a scientist, to return from a trip overseas, where she helps launch the Hadron Collider. Afterwards, Abdullayev said, “Things start happening.” She’s not picking up her phone, she’s not on the plane, the skies are not blue, and there are 13 hours on the clock. The child starts asking, “Is Mommy in heaven?”

The 22-minute film was shot on location in Clifton Park, Troy, and “next to my backyard” near the Guilderland Post Office, said Abdullayev, who is married and the father of three girls, ages 9, 4, and 1.

Oldest child Angelina Abdullaeva, who attends Guilderland Elementary School, is one of the movie’s three stars.

The other leads are played by Nicholas Baroudi and Erin Waterhouse, both local talents, Abdullayev said. Baroudi is a stage actor who is also accomplished in films and television commercials. Waterhouse has acted in a number of films and has performed widely in the Capital District, including in the Capital Repertory Theatre’s “The Secret Garden.”

“We have real professionals in the film industry here locally,” Abdullayev said. “There’s just no funding.”

Guilderland earned a Ph.D. in cell biology in Japan — where he accompanied a professor who had a grant and needed a graduate student’s help — before getting his first job offer in the Capital District. He worked in biomedical research at Albany Medical Center and Ordway Research Institute for nine years before he was “let go because they ran out of funds.”

He then worked as the manager of a company called YS Catalytic Recycling, but was “depressed and bored” there. He spent much of his days writing stories.

“Stories come and go,” he said.

The boss, Eugene Sandul, who financed the film, was realistic about his investment and told him, Abdullayev said, “It’s a short film. You’re not going to make money. You don’t need to give it back.”

Sandul is credited as a producer on the film. Abdullayev also named the company that produced the film Andromeda YS Productions, after Sandul’s firm.

He explained, of Sandul’s investment, “It was a kind of jump start.”

Abdullayev currently works full-time at making films and writing books, while also taking care of his children and his home.

His wife, who is also from Uzbekistan, supports the family with her job as an internal auditor at the New York State Comptroller’s Office.

Guilderland also hopes to make a triptych of three short films. The scripts are ready, but, he said, it’s hard to get funding. The titles are “Twelves Minutes a Picnic,” “Cocktail Muerte,” and “American Seppuku.”

In order to generate buzz and raise money, he has decided to publish the three scripts first as a book on Amazon’s CreateSpace, which offers publishing-on-demand, to make it easier for him to get them into the hands of producers and executives.

He said, “When people want the book, they just order it, and Amazon prints it.” It will also be available as an e-book.

Abdullayev has located a graphic illustrator in California, Emmanuel Xerx Javier, who created one full-page color illustration to accompany each of the three scripts. Another possible plan for the future, he says, is to work with Javier to create a graphic novel from the scripts.

Whether he is collaborating with artists in other parts of the country or here at home in the local film community, one thing is clear: Alex Guilderland has a lot of ideas.