03/09/2026
We built a fully custom WordPress theme for award-winning Canadian filmmaker and writer Maya Bastian.
The brief was simple: the site needed to feel like her work. Cinematic, intentional, unhurried. So we started with the homepage.
When you land on mayabastian.com, her latest film starts playing full-screen, muted. A "Now Playing" title fades in briefly, then disappears. When it ends, the next film in her catalogue begins automatically. When the last film finishes, the site navigates you to her About page.
There's no interface to learn. You just watch.
Pause the video and a film switcher grid appears over the footage. Each card shows the film's thumbnail, title, and her role. Click one and it starts playing. The system handles both YouTube and Vimeo clips, switching between their respective player APIs seamlessly, with polling fallbacks to handle the cases where those APIs miss the "ended" event.
The Press page works the same way: read-first, navigate second. Every article link tries to open the piece inline, in a custom reading pane on top of the page. If the publication blocks iframing (Variety, Deadline, CBC and others do), the viewer detects this and instead shows a clean confirmation dialog: "This article will open in a new tab. Close that tab to return to MayaBastian.com."
On the Films page, each entry shows the embedded video or thumbnail, her role, collapsible synopsis, production tags, credits, and an optional external link. On the About page, her bio sits beside a mosaic of 32 photos from her career, each opening a full keyboard-navigable lightbox.
All of it runs on a single 587-line vanilla JavaScript file. No jQuery. No React. No bundler. Just code.
Built for a filmmaker whose work has screened at Cannes, appeared in Variety and Deadline, and been supported by CBC, Netflix, and the Canadian Film Centre.
mayabastian.com
