Alliance Films hopes Passchendaele will be one of the fall’s top date films.

That might at first seem unlikely, seeing as the central event in Paul Gross’ epic drama, set to open on 190 screens nationwide on Oct. 17, is a muddy, bloody First World War battle that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, as Canadian and British forces took the titular Belgian village in a display of sheer determination. 

No doubt there are audiences for a straightforward Great War yarn – many of them regularly tune in to History Television. But those aficionados alone wouldn’t be enough for the film to recoup its $20-million budget – an unprecedented price tag for a feature financed entirely in this country. (It will be challenging for the film to ever make its money back, but its unique funding structure makes that concern less pressing than usual.)

Gross, who wrote, directed and stars in the film, has designed it to reach out to more than just armchair historians. It looks to appeal to both sides of the gender demographic, with a romance between Canadian soldier Michael Dunne (Gross) and morphine-addicted nurse Sarah Mann (Caroline Dhavernas) front and center. The tagline for the war epic’s posters is: ‘in love, there is only one rule… don’t die.’

And this romantic spirit pervades Alliance’s sizable promotional campaign.

‘We’ve never made teaching people Canadian history the focus of our marketing thinking on this,’ explains Mark Slone, Alliance’s SVP marketing and publicity. ‘This has always been about how can we get people to be aware enough to… understand why it’s a great movie as entertainment.’

Slone is uneasy about the suggestion of trying to make the gruesome 90-year-old conflict ‘sexy,’ but adds, ‘the sexy part of this is the sexy leads, and the human story is the heart of Passchendaele. What you learn – and the fact that there is so much factual stuff in it – that’s the icing on the cake. But the cake is Paul and Caroline.’

The film was selected to open the Toronto International Film Festival, playing to a mixed reaction. Certainly a number of intelligent, cinema-savvy filmgoers – male and female – dabbed a tear as the credits rolled, while at least as many in my own informal survey were disappointed. The romance angle, according to whom you talk to, is either the film’s strength or its weakness.

But no matter, really, because Gross didn’t make the film for industry insiders – he made it for the mainstream Canadian ticket-buying public. And, as has been proven, Canuck audiences like Paul Gross. His previous feature as helmer, Men with Brooms, may not have topped many critics’ lists, but it did take in more than $4 million at the domestic box office – a height rarely scaled for English-Canadian films.

And if Alliance has its way, its multi-pronged marketing assault will make every single person in this country aware of the film, and many of them will see it – even if they don’t actually lay down cash for a ticket at the local multiplex.

This all goes back to how the film’s funding was put together. In addition to a number of the usual suspects – including Alliance, Canwest, Telefilm Canada, the Alberta Film Development Program, The Harold Greenberg Fund and The Movie Network – Gross also successfully solicited a number of private investors and an extraordinary $4 million from Ralph Klein’s previous Alberta government. After all, Gross is a good old Calgary boy, and an Alberta regimen – which included his grandfather – was central in the battle’s Allied push.

Also on board is charitable historical organization The Dominion Institute, which, along with the provincial government, will later distribute Alliance’s DVDs of the film to all Alberta schools and Royal Canadian Legion branches across the country. Certainly students today could stand to learn more about the First World War, and as any teacher will tell you, modern entertainment is the best way to get kids engaged in history.

Still, there is a lot riding on the domestic box office of Passchendaele. It comes on the heels of Blindness, another major release of a Canadian project from Alliance – in this case a copro with Brazil and Japan that, like Passchendaele, features Rhombus Media’s Niv Fichman as producer. Whereas Blindness opened on 99 Canuck screens – about half as many as Passchendaele will get, that film – with its generic setting and international cast including Julianne Moore, Danny Glover and Mark Ruffalo – holds much more promise for foreign markets, even if its opening-weekend box office in the U.S. was disappointing.  

Gross and Fichman set out to make a uniquely Canadian story and accept that Canadians might make up most of the film’s audience. The project’s producers – also including Gross’ Whizbang Films and Damberger Film and Cattle Company – are handling international sales, and Fichman informs Playback that he has none yet to report.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Alliance is doing all the right things. The distrib has placed the film’s trailer ahead of screenings of top recent titles including Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Burn After Reading. TV spots have popped up during eps of Big Brother, Prison Break and Brothers and Sisters. Online ads have appeared on popular destinations including Sympatico/MSN and Canoe.ca, and the film has its own robust site.

While Slone won’t hazard to guess the film’s box-office performance, given the scale of its release, an opening week of $600,000 would be good.

And give creator Gross credit. Not only has he made a film with a shot at widespread appeal, but he has also made his case for it as a national cultural artifact. Love the flick or not, it’s one Canadian production that the naysayers can’t dismiss as a pointless venture or a waste of taxpayers’ money.     

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This story has been corrected. It originally stated that the Alberta government had contributed $4 million to Passchendaele, when in fact it contributed $5.5 million. Also, the Alberta Film Development Program did not fund the film, as previously written.