LOS ANGELES – Like most independent filmmakers, Jennifer Elster had to cope with making her debut film “Particles of Truth” on a shoestring budget.

But first, the New York City resident faced the fear and disruption of the World Trade Center attacks – directly across the street from her apartment.

Elster and her husband, filmmaker Lewis Helfer, were home when the planes struck the twin towers. She had planned to start pre-production on her film, a dark romance about lost souls, on Sept. 15, 2001.

“So many things happened that were so horrible, so many things we saw, so many emotions we went through,” Elster said in a phone call from New York, where her film debuts Friday. The Sundance Channel will air it in December.

Forced to relocate for four months, “I had a hard time understanding that things could come back to the way they are again,” she said.

Elster began casting her film the day she returned home.

“People would come to the door, crying hysterically, and they’d say, `I haven’t been this close to the site,'” she recalled.

“Particles of Truth,” which Elster wrote and directed, stars Gale Harold (Showtime’s “Queer as Folk”) and Elster as troubled artists who can’t accept love or success until they make peace with the past.

A film festival selection in Los Angeles, New York and other cities, the movie was praised by critics as emotionally intense and sharply drawn.

Elster, a one-time fashion stylist who helped create and cast videos and photo shoots for pop artists including David Bowie, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson and Moby, had made two short films before “Particles of Truth.” She’s working with her husband on his movie, “Life on the Ledge.”

Although “Particles of Truth” doesn’t mention the terrorist attack Elster believes the tragedy was an inevitable influence.

“I think there are aspects of the energy of 9/11, that certain nervousness,” she said. “In hindsight, everything is neatly organized, ‘Oh, yes, that happened, and the magnitude was huge.’

“But everyone forgets how nervous they were at the time,” she said.

No one dropped out of the project “but that was always a fear _ that something would happen and people wouldn’t be able to deal with it. You’d think everybody would run for the hills.”