As Paul Gross opens this year’s Toronto International Film Festival with his feature Passchendaele, Martha Burns, his wife, and fellow actress Susan Coyne will be nearby, premiering their short How Are You? as part of the festival’s Short Cuts Canada program.

‘A comedy about grief’ is how the duo bills their co-directorial bow – an ordinary, everyday kind of grief that comes when you face sudden loss and the awkward encounters with friends and family that inevitably follow.

‘In my mind, and Martha’s mind, we have reached a time of life where this is the norm – life-changing events are happening to us, whether from separation, illness or a career that doesn’t work out. This is that time of life,’ Coyne explains.

For Burns, that life-changing event was a bout with cancer, and for Coyne, it was marital separation. The two women – friends since childhood – confided in each other on the road or on the sets of Slings & Arrows, Blindness and The Trojan Horse, in which both acted. (Coyne was also a writer on Slings.)

Sometimes their frustration was directed at friends and acquaintances who would ask, ‘How are you?’ but didn’t wait for an answer before offering unsolicited advice, or exposing their own grief.

‘We were looking at events and talking about them, and then thought, let’s see if we can take this and make it into a good, funny story,’ Burns says.

The result is a 17-minute film about Olivia Kay, played by Coyne, who finds courage after a recent divorce to go into town on Valentine’s Day, only to run into neighbors and friends who insist on weighing in on why her marriage, and often their own, has failed.

How Are You? is an antidote to the notion you need to share in times of trial and adversity, or that you only discover who your friends are in such times. The way Coyne and Burns tell it, you mostly learn your friends’ dark secrets, or bothersome sides.

In the end, Olivia finds inner peace from an unlikely source: herself.

Her epiphany comes by way of a dramatic trope Coyne and Burns chose after long thought and trial: the arty split-screen technique to project separate Olivias side by side to raise the emotional ante.

We find Olivia alone in her apartment, in sudden earshot of an operatic aria. She goes in search of the source, only to find her doppelganger: a second Olivia as Lenora, the tortured lover of Don Alvaro in Giuseppe Verdi’s La Forza del Destino.

As the first Olivia looks on in bemused puzzlement, her look-a-like, also played by Coyne, adorned in a red satin evening dress and elbowed gloves, sings the powerhouse aria Pace, pace mio Dio. As she reaches her high notes, Lenora calls on God to grant her elusive peace, as she still loves Alvaro, despite all the suffering he has caused her.

‘It’s complicated to write a character in two parts. We had to watch a lot of Hayley Mills to do this simply, with no money,’ Burns recalls, referring to the 1961 Disney classic The Parent Trap.

She adds operatic singing was chosen over the spoken word to provide Olivia, and the film, with an emotional climax.

As classically trained actors, Burns and Coyne know that reciting lines from Shakespeare, for example, puts you in a higher emotional space than everyday speech.

But singing is the topper. ‘The greatest expression is to have sound coming from the belly. Opera is the human voice at the highest emotional pitch,’ Burns insists.

After so much sadness, the parting image from How Are You? is laughter between the two Olivias, as they sit and talk on a sofa. And the lesson is that inside Olivia One is an Olivia Two sharing the same body, and through which she can find strength in weakness.

After their first film, Coyne and Burns plan an anthology of shorts entitled Little Films About Big Moments, to be folded into an hour-long presentation.

The idea sprang from conversations the duo had with creative talent and crew on the set of How Are You?, including producer Sonya Di Rienzo, DOP Chris Romeike, production designer Johanna Weinstein and editor Christopher Donaldson.

Many revealed their own stories of life-changing events, which prompted Coyne and Burns to join with producer Semi Chellas and find nine emerging filmmakers to be paired with mentors including Sarah Polley, Bruce McDonald and Guy Maddin, so that each can turn these into a three- to five-minute film.

Other mentors include Gross, helmers Peter Wellington and John L’Ecuyer, production designer Phillip Barker and editor Susan Shipton.

The creative effort will culminate with a 10-day shoot in January, during which all nine shorts will be filmed with the same crew and DOP David Franco. A tenth short is planned as a making-of film to chronicle the entire initiative.

How Are You? was produced in association with the National Film Board and has already been picked up by the CBC for its CBC Reflections series.