Who are we, beneath brand names, ethnic designations and man-made addictions, and how do we relate to – or, really, see – our families or broader society? Four Canadian features in TIFF2006’s Contemporary World Cinema program look to digest these universal issues.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide is the scene for the $7-million A Sunday in Kigali. Before adapting Gil Courtemanche’s celebrated novel, Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali, writer/director Robert Favreau (Les Muses orphelines) ‘read everything’ on the massacre and traveled to Africa.

‘I needed to see the country and feel the people,’ Favreau recalls. When he began casting and scouting locations in Kigali in February 2005, ‘those two dimensions got me very involved with the concrete reality of the country. You visit houses; the people talk about what they’ve been through.’

The film follows fictional Quebecer Bernard Valcourt, who goes to Rwanda to shoot a documentary. Aware that rising Tutsi-Hutu tensions could provoke homicidal madness, he nonetheless stays because he’s fallen in love with Gentille (Fatou N’Diaye), a Tutsi.

The responsibility of faithfully translating the horrors that overtook the country terrified Favreau. He unflinchingly shot graphic scenes, including a rape, because ‘a quarter of a million women lived through that.’

DOP Pierre Mignot (C.R.A.Z.Y.) shot on 35mm over 38 days with a cast of 15 Quebecers, including Luc Picard as Valcourt, plus 20 Rwandans in speaking roles, 50 in non-speaking ones and 2,500 as extras. Lyse Lafontaine and Michael Mosca produced Equinoxe’s first dramatic feature, which has its English-Canadian premiere at TIFF following a run in Quebec where it earned more than $1 million at the box office.

The desire to give voice to aboriginal women encouraged Métis playwright Marie Clements to ensure her play, The Unnatural & Accidental Women, evolved into a film. She mentioned the idea to colleague Jason James and he took it to Carl Bessai (Emile), who would end up directing, shooting and producing along with James.

The story, about Rebecca, an aboriginal woman searching for her mother in Vancouver’s squalid Downtown Eastside, struck Bessai as ‘different and structurally challenging. On the one hand, you have this gritty, almost documentary-like telling of the story, and on the other hand there’s magic realism.’

He says Clements wanted to create a multifaceted image of women like Rebecca – an impression that spirituality, poetry, beauty and even joy find space in lives that look to be only about alcoholism, prostitution and despair. Thus the narrative of Rebecca’s search triggers other plot lines, each about women doomed to fall victim to a local predator, but also featuring surreal elements that reveal other aspects of their characters.

The crew and cast for Unnatural & Accidental, as the film is titled – with Carmen Moore as Rebecca and Callum Keith Rennie in a tour-de-force turn as predator Norman – shot for 18 days in summer 2005. They logged 12-hour nights, both in the closed-off wing of a mental hospital and over two weeks on Eastside streets. Setups often had to allow for ‘FX builds’ to enable production of surreal imagery.

For all its visual achievements, courtesy of Vancouver’s Lost Boys Studios, the budget came in under $1 million, with funding from Telefilm Canada, The Harold Greenberg Fund, the CanWest Western Independent Producers Fund, The Movie Network, Movie Central, B.C. Film and tax credits. James and Bessai produced for Resonance Films and Raven West Films, respectively.

A guerrilla approach is behind both the philosophy and filmmaking style of the low-low-budget Monkey Warfare by Reg Harkema and Sleeping Dogs by Terrance Odette.

As Monkey Warfare was taking shape for writer/director Harkema (A Girl Is a Girl), he knew he wanted to tell the story of a pair of former guerilla warriors gone underground and living ‘off the grid’ in Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood. He also knew he wanted to cast real-life couple Don McKellar and Tracy Wright as ex-radicals Dan and Linda, who eke out a living by selling treasures they find in junk piles. When Dan meets a young would-be radical who reawakens his antiestablishment passions, he and Linda must confess that their own ‘guerilla warfare’ tactics may have ruined an innocent man’s life.

The director’s notes by Harkema (also the editor of Childstar and Falling Angels) say his film is ‘about a world on the edge of apocalypse. Revolution and violence have become both our daily news and our entertainment. How can one fight back in a world going to hell when those in power inevitably co-opt and control you?’

Producer Jennifer Jonas (Childstar) hopes the film will make people pause and think about the forces controlling their lives, and where they find entertainment. ‘In North America we are more and more being bent to the lowest common denominator,’ she says.

Production credits go to Jonas and Leonard Farlinger of New Real Films along with Kristopher King. Given that Telefilm limited its participation to completion financing, and that, according to Jonas, the film’s budget came in ‘under $1 million’ (including Harkema’s line of credit), the producers gratefully tapped ACTRA’s TIP program and the cooperation of the crew. Harkema serves as the film’s music editor – with big plans for music on the film’s website – under the moniker DJ Hans Lucas. No distrib was on board at press time.

Coproducers Vanessa Shrimpton and Odette began bringing Odette’s art-film vision for Sleeping Dogs to the screen on the strength of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. From January to May 2005, they developed the story of Mr. Gloss, a King Lear-like character who escapes from a rehab hospital to try to save his dog from euthanasia.

In June, in what Shrimpton calls ‘an astounding feat,’ the crew shot 10 days in Ontario’s low-cost Kitchener-Waterloo region. Some cast members came from the local theater community, while Toronto’s Brian Stillar plays Mr. Gloss and Tony Adah plays the hospital orderly sent to find him. Three more days were shot last November and January.

Odette, who previously directed Saint Monica and who also edited the Ron Mann doc Tales of the Rat Fink, which is also at TIFF, says he took the low-budget route to maintain creative control. He also edited the film, which is shot on HDV, on his laptop, using Final Cut Pro 5. The movie was then laser-recorded to film.

Once again, Telefilm contributed completion financing, which helped pay for music rights, on what was to be a $200,000 film. Shrimpton says Sleeping Dogs will also screen at the Vancouver fest and the producers have closed a pay-TV deal.

‘We’re doing everything we can to sell the film,’ says Odette. ‘I’m not totally closed to the idea of a film distributor, but I’m not sure if it’s good business in Canada.’ He reckons the grassroots approach, complemented by the TIFF Group’s Film Circuit, will work better.