I’m willing to wager that ‘controversial’ is the adjective most frequently used to describe forthcoming Canadian films in our past couple of issues. Of course, it is film festival time, and promoting controversy is one way a production can rise from the fall’s deep cinematic muck. Though keep in mind the rule we used to live by back in the day when I worked at the Toronto International Film Festival box office – the sexier the picture in the TIFF program book, or the sexier the title, often the worse the film.

Controversy comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s right there in Deepa Mehta’s Water, TIFF 2005’s opening-night film. This drama isn’t trying to stir the pot with gratuitous sex or gruesome violence. Rather, it is addressing a human rights issue in India that has provided fodder for a number of works over the years – how young widows have been cast out of Indian society, with no chance of remarrying. Despite the fact that the events in the film take place 70 years ago, Mehta has touched a nerve with certain conservative elements in her native country – as she did with Fire and Earth, her trilogy’s two previous installments – which infamously led to the production of Water being shut off five years ago by a disapproving mob.

However, the film’s notoriety is being played very shrewdly. On one hand, Mehta tells Playback, ‘There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to get into the [film’s] history. I don’t want to be perceived as a victim, or a heroine that met all the odds and made the film.’ Meanwhile, distributor Mongrel Media is preparing a doc about the film’s troubled and protracted birth for a DVD release next year, and Mehta’s own daughter, Devyani Saltzman, has written a book about it.

Mehta can downplay it all she wants, but she is a heroine, sticking with this project as she has, finally shooting in secrecy amidst the specter of potentially violent opposition.

The situation is reminiscent of last year’s National Film Board documentary What Remains of Us, about how individual Tibetans risked arrest by viewing a taped message from their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. When the film premiered at Hot Docs 2004, security guards were stationed at the theater entrance to ensure no recording devices were brought in, to protect the identity of the Tibetans featured in the film. This publicity helped the doc rack up about $500,000 in domestic box office and pick up distribution in the U.S. through Seventh Art Releasing.

As of this writing, Water is soon to make its TIFF debut – with some foreseeing the potential for protesters outside Roy Thomson Hall, where it will screen – but it has already nailed down stateside distribution through Fox Searchlight Pictures. The buzz about the film is spreading exponentially. Google Fox’s pickup of Water, and you will get more than 18,000 hits.

Another high-profile case is Atom Egoyan’s thriller Where the Truth Lies, starring Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as a Martin-and-Lewis-type comedy duo with a skeleton in its closet. The film, also getting the TIFF gala treatment, raised eyebrows when it premiered at Cannes due to its sexual content, but the response in the U.S. has been more severe. The ratings body there, the Motion Picture Association of America, has slapped the film with an NC-17 rating, meaning no one 17-years-old and under will be admitted to see the film. Officially, the clincher for the MPAA is a threesome scene involving lead actors Bacon and Firth and Rachel Blanchard, which it says is too graphic.

What others see as the true problem for this ‘voice and advocate of the American motion picture industry’ is that the scene involves two men. Apparently the MPAA feels that U.S. moviegoers should be protected from the option of seeing this.

Egoyan and producer Robert Lantos are incensed that the NC-17 rating, which will stand unless Egoyan can talk the MPAA out of it or recuts the offending scene, means that the leading Regal Cinemas chain in the U.S., among others, won’t carry the film and certain media outlets will not carry the advertising. With a $30-million price tag, Where the Truth Lies needs the American market.

However, there is an upside. First, there are other exhibitors that will screen the film. Based in Tennessee, many of Regal’s theaters are in middle America, and with all due respect to Mr. Egoyan’s art-house oeuvre, that ain’t where he’s gonna find his fan base. Rather, distributor ThinkFilm will be focusing its efforts on the east and west coasts, where audiences can handle the odd ménage a trios, or two.

And the whole ratings kerfuffle – with the filmmakers crying censorship – has landed the film on the front cover of a national daily. It’s the kind of publicity that you can’t buy, and it’s also the kind of boost a Canadian film needs to get ahead in this tough racket known as the international movie biz.