Opening night film Fugitive Pieces, a big-screen adaptation of the lyrical novel by Anne Michaels, appears to have been a labor of love by all who tackled the less-than-uplifting material that begins in the depths of the Holocaust and extends to the 1970s in examining the long-term after-effects of such trauma.

To hear author Anne Michaels and director and screenwriter Jeremy Podeswa tell it, the transition from page to screen was nothing short of a love-in. ‘We had a rare relationship, perhaps a first in film history,’ Michaels gushed, ‘a great friendship.’

She said: ‘He captured the ineffable soul of the book.’

He said: ‘It was a very collaborative and generous relationship.’

Sure, you’ve heard it before, only to learn later that they hate each other’s guts. But along with the niceties, they did seem to have benefited from mutual common decency.

Podeswa reported at a TIFF press conference that, early on, Michaels told him, ‘The book is the book, the movie is the movie. Include or leave out what you want.’ Yet he showed her his drafts throughout, and Michaels, for her part, said her MO, which any collaborator might do well to take in, was, ‘Only speak when spoken to.’

Robert Lantos had read the book, but believed it could never be made into a film. It was Podeswa’s script that moved him to throw his mogul might behind the project, breaking what he said on opening night was a sacred law in the biz, ‘Thou must never invest thine own money.’

How much he put into the $10.5-million picture, and his likelihood of getting it out again, remains to be seen. Asked about the U.S. theatrical release, Lantos said only, ‘Stay tuned.’

‘This is one of those rare instances in the film business in which who’s going to distribute the film has nothing to do with who’s going to pay the most money for it,’ he said later in an interview. ‘I’d like to make sure the film ends up in a home where they really care for it, and understand it, and believe in it as much as I do.’

As much as negotiating distribution is a black art, it’s probably not as complicated as what the makers had to do to get the project to this point. The script was a challenge on several levels, Podeswa said — the first being straight logistics. The tale moves back and forth in time and across the ocean between Poland, Canada and Greece, and the language drifts between English, Polish, Yiddish, German and Greek. Podeswa wrote it in English and then brought in translators. ‘I think it gives the film a kind of veracity,’ he said.

‘The challenge was to do it so it appears to be complex, but to make it very accessible, so the audience is never lost,’ he added. ‘You always know where you are, who you’re dealing with, and what time period and country you’re in. I think that’s one of the really successful things about the movie. It manages to be really complicated and really simple at the same time.’

Getting the languages and pronunciation right was a big part of the job for the thesps, as well, he noted. Lead Rade Sherbedgia (Battle in Seattle, The Fog, Batman Begins), a Serbian from Croatia, plays a multilingual Greek who emigrates to Canada. He had perhaps the toughest task, sliding back and forth between several languages, often in mid-sentence.

But it was the mimicking skills of young Robbie Kay, a British lad who today makes the Czech Republic home, who plays the traumatized young Jakob, who stood out for Podeswa as being particularly astute. ‘He was amazingly adept. He would just hear a line once or twice, in Greek or Yiddish, and he would pronounce it perfectly.’

Even the English-language roles took some coaching, since Brits Stephen Dillane, Ed Stoppard and Rosamund Pike were portraying Canadians. ‘He [Lantos] was worried about us doing caricatures,’ said Pike, ‘but we felt we were in Canada and we were to be from Canada, so we wanted to give it a go.’

Podeswa does not feel the film’s multinational feel either limits or helps the film’s distribution prospects. ‘It’s what the film had to be.’

Fugitive Pieces is being released in Canadian theaters on Oct. 25.