For Emily Yoshida, it all began with “Star Trek.”

Growing up in University Place, she got hooked on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” at the tender age of 4. “I was sort of raised on that,” she said. She’s a Picard person, a Data aficionado. Now 23, she’s never lost her love of science fiction.

In fact her sci-fi fixation only grew through the years. It grew to the point where now she’s a newly fledged filmmaker, and her first film, titled “Abigail,” is on the program of the fourth annual Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival, which will be held Saturday at the Cinerama Theatre, 2100 Fourth Ave., in downtown Seattle.

Yoshida is the only female filmmaker to have made it into the festival’s 20-film lineup, said Maggie Skinner, a spokeswoman for the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, also known as EMP, which is mounting the festival in cooperation with the Seattle International Film Festival.

“It seems like the sci-fi world is not big on girls,” Yoshida said.

She is also is the only director with a Northwest background in the festival, Skinner said. Yoshida moved away from the Tacoma area at age 12, after having attended University Place Elementary School (now University Place Primary School) and Narrows View Intermediate School (also in University Place), and now lives in Los Angeles,

Yoshida said she’s been to the EMP in the past and “I really liked what they’re trying to do. It was cool to be accepted by an organization that I admired.”

Set in L.A. some 30 years in the future, Yoshida’s 12-minute minidrama orbits around the disappearance of its title character, an L.A. teen. She vanishes following a visit to what the filmmaker describes as a nightclub with a “hybrid environment.” There, the line between the real world and the virtual world is blurred to the point where what constitutes reality becomes very difficult to discern.

Seventeen-year-old Abigail fails to return from the club after a nocturnal visit there with her best friend, a girl named Sam. Sam spends the rest of the picture searching for her and discovers Abigail may have gone where no human has gone before.

In the film’s imagined future, “the culture has become so saturated with communication that people start to lose their actual physical presence,” Yoshida said somewhat cryptically.

Yoshida wrote and directed “Abigail” as her thesis project at the film school at UCLA. She shot it in November and December of 2007 at locations around L.A., including Little Tokyo and the city’s famed Second Street Tunnel. The tunnel has been used in many movies, including “Blade Runner.”

It just so happens that Ridley Scott’s acclaimed depiction of a dystopian future is Yoshida’s favorite sci-fi movie of all time. By no coincidence at all, she decided to film a brief scene from “Abigail” there. It was, she said, “my little homage. We were in the area, and I went, ‘Come on. We have to do it.’”

Yoshida likes “Blade Runner” for what she says is “almost a realistic depiction of what the future would be like.” She said she tried to imbue “Abigail” with that same spirit.

With a crew of 15 and with a cast that included 10 speaking roles, “Abigail” was a fairly elaborate production as student films go. Yoshida said she financed most of its $12,000 production budget out of grants, paying for the rest with credit cards and even dipping into her savings.

Since completing “Abigail,” Yoshida graduated from UCLA and has begun working on a script for her next film, a feature. She’s been working on the screenplay while visiting her mother, North End resident Nancy Bishop, for the past several weeks. Bishop will be on hand for Saturday’s screening of “Abigail.”

Two screenings will be held Saturday, one from 4 to 6 p.m. the other from 7 to 9 p.m. Ten films will be shown at each screening. “Abigail” will be shown during the 7-9 p.m. block. An awards ceremony will be held following the second screening.

Tickets are $9 for a single session and $15 for both. They’re available at www.siff.net. For more information, call 206-464-5830.

Soren Andersen: 253-597-8660