Toronto: It took a lot of ‘begging, groveling and manipulating,’ but writer/director Ruba Nadda has assembled an impressive cast and crew for her third feature, Coldwater. The lighthearted romance, now shooting on location around Toronto, stars Ararat’s Arsinee Khanjian and David Alpay, both Shawn Doyle and Jeff Seymour of The Eleventh Hour, plus Kathryn Winslow of This Is Wonderland. Tracey Boulton (The Rhino Brothers) produces under execs Atom Egoyan, Deepa Mehta and Simone Urdl.

Nadda spoke with Playback during a recent shoot in the city’s west end.

‘My biggest problem was finding a producer – a partner who was an equal,’ she says, nodding towards Boulton. ‘I remember when we were going for our first meeting, I was so broke and I asked my boyfriend, ‘Should I buy her lunch?”

She did, and the pair hit it off, getting to work on the story of a conservative Arab woman (Khanjian) who falls for a non-Muslim Canadian (Doyle), eventually forcing her to choose between a disapproving family and her newfound independence.

It certainly doesn’t sound ‘lighthearted.’ Nadda’s previous films (Unsettled, I Always Come to You) and many shorts (Black September, Slut, etc.) have pretty much all been gritty, black and white, and serious as heart attacks. She insists this one is different.

‘When I came up with the idea, it just wasn’t gritty. It was the wrong tone. Gritty went out the window,’ she says. ‘I’d made 14 films that looked like that and I wanted to do something different.’

She won’t say how much it’s going to cost, but she wants Coldwater to look polished and glamorous. The picture is backed by an advance from distributor Mongrel Media, and by the Canadian Television Fund, Telefilm Canada and The Harold Greenberg Fund.

Nadda contacted Egoyan shortly after securing development cash from Telefilm, explaining in a letter that she had Khanjian, his wife, in mind for the lead role. Both came on board and Egoyan brought in Mehta. Also attached are DOP Luc Montpellier (The Saddest Music in the World), editor Teresa Hannigan and production designer Jonathan Dueck.

At 31, still bright-eyed and all smiles, Nadda has already done a lot with her career. Retrospectives of her work have played in Rotterdam, Vienna and San Francisco, and she moonlights as a widely published fiction writer. And yet she admits she’s not entirely happy with her body of work. ‘I’ve made tons of mistakes,’ she says. ‘I think the thing that haunts me is I could never get 100% of what I wanted on the screen.’

Mongrel will release Coldwater sometime in 2005 or 2006.