The 25th anniversary Atlantic Film Festival’s Opening Gala on Sept. 15 will feature the Atlantic premiere of writer/director Thom Fitzgerald’s drama 3 Needles. Produced through Fitzgerald’s Halifax prodco Emotion Pictures and distributed by Seville Pictures, 3 Needles tracks a global epidemic as experienced across three continents.

‘I wanted the movie to flow like a book of short stories rather than a novel,’ says Fitzgerald. ‘We all know that a virus mutates with exposure to other life forms, and in these stories, I wanted to explore how people mutate as a result of their exposure to a virus.

‘The film is really a prayer, which is an admission I am reluctant to make in this day and age,’ he admits. ‘But the truth is, the storytelling and characters were inspired by my own questions to God, and the making of the film a meditation on finding answers to the unanswerable.’

3 Needles features a star-studded cast that includes Lucy Liu, Chloë Sevigny, Sandra Oh, Stockard Channing and Olympic Dukakis.

‘I feel guilty asking Oscar and [Canadian award] winners to work for discounted scale,’ Fitzgerald told the Calgary Sun in 2003, ‘which is all I’m able to offer because my budgets rarely get into the millions.’ Nevertheless, the stars are willing to take what Fitzgerald offers for a chance to work with the 37-year-old filmmaker, who made a mark with his first feature, The Hanging Garden (1997), following it up with The Wild Dogs (2002) and The Event (2003).

The AFF is equally eager to feature Fitzgerald’s new work on its 2005 opening night.

‘3 Needles is our big red-carpet event,’ says Lia Rinaldo, AFF festival director, in an interview with Playback. ‘We’re even going to have two simultaneous screenings. This will be followed by an Opening Gala party, where we’re hoping for a lot of special guests. We’re planning to close down one of Halifax’s central streets so that we have enough room for about 3,000 people.’

The following night, director Amnon Buchbinder’s comedy-drama Whole New Thing will screen as the AFF’s Atlantic Gala. The offbeat story of a 13-year-old boy’s attraction to his middle-aged male teacher, played by East Coast icon Daniel MacIvor, who cowrote the script with Buchbinder, Whole New Thing also stars newcomer Aaron Webber along with Rebecca Jenkins (Wilby Wonderful) and Robert Joy (Sex Traffic).

For Buchbinder, showing Whole New Thing at AFF is ‘uniquely important.’ The film, he explains, ‘was made in Halifax, the crew was from Halifax, and all but a couple of cast members were from Halifax. Everything about this film is drawn from Nova Scotia!’

The experience of shooting the film in the province went so well, in fact, ‘that I want to make all my movies there now,’ the Toronto-based Buchbinder adds. ‘Or at least bring the crew I had there where I shoot.’ Whole New Thing is distributed in Canada through ThinkFilm.