Eugene Celico, left, directs Michael Mazzeo in The Tournament.

PROVIDENCE — After 19 days of shooting his semi-autobiographical film The Tournament on locations across his hometown of Westerly, writer-director Eugene Celico remembers the happy moment filming was finished.

“It was July 3, 2004 . . . 12:35 a.m.,” he recalls. “We finished and everyone screamed and then we all went to a cast party.”

But that was two years ago. Two years between the cast party for completion of filming and its premiere screening at 5 p.m. tomorrow at the Columbus Theatre as part of the Rhode Island International Film Festival. Two long years.

It’s a familiar story to filmmakers, especially the kind of independent filmmakers who populate the RIIFF every year in hopes someone will give some recognition to their films and send them off to fame, if not fortune. You could do two Hollywood feature films, such as Underdog, which completed filming in Providence at the end of July, in the time it took Celico to get The Tournament before the public. Underdog, whose visual effects are currently being tweaked in London, is slated to be released next Aug. 3, a year after filming finished. It should be ready even earlier, by what was its original release date of May 2007, and would have been completed even sooner than that had it not been for the extensive computer work being done in London.

But Celico said that, as with many independent filmmakers, the budget was the problem. “We spent three-and-a-half months doing nothing but raising money,” he said. “You’d get to a certain point and run out of money. Then you’d do a screening with the footage that was available to show what you’d done and make a little speech and hope to raise more.”

The cash was needed to pay film editor Sandra Consentino, who was putting the film together at her home studio in Connecticut. Consentino has won a Cable ACE Award for a Muhammad Ali documentary and an Emmy for her work on the Lucy-Desi Home Movie film.

The results, so far, have been gratifying. The 54-year-old Celico held four screenings for people around Westerly “including a final one for the entire cast, and everyone reacted in the right places where I’d hoped they would.”

But now it’s a waiting game. The Tournament will be screened at a film festival in Hoboken, N.J., in September, said Celico, adding that producer Nick Puccio’s best friend, actor Frank Vincent, has had it entered in the Queens Film Festival in the fall. They’ve also submitted it to the Sundance Film Festival in Utah in January and are still waiting to hear about that.

“We waited two months for the Rhode Island International Film Festival to say ‘yes, yes, yes,’ ” Celico said, adding that “a couple of people at HBO have looked at it and Nick has people looking at it at Miramax.”

But, as Celico is well aware, nothing is certain until a contract is signed. “My second feature — Loose Cannons — went to [the] Slamdance [Festival] where it was presented as a work in progress. It made it to the finals, but didn’t get shown in the festival. Now it’s just sitting near my bed in a can.”

He has more hopes for The Tournament, which started as a play that was done as a staged reading at Brown University in 1978. Celico, who writes scripts for other filmmakers when he’s not making his own movies — there’s a sci-fi one about the Bermuda Triangle in the works — said when he decided to shoot a film in Westerly, he adapted his play. Tomorrow the public will be able to tell him if he hit the mark.