Before Tomorrow is already on the radar screen — having won the best Canadian first feature prize at TIFF — but a World Dramatic Competition slot at Sundance 2009 (Jan. 15-25) should be a major boost for the fortunes of the latest film from Canada’s other coast.

Directed by Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu, the film stars Piujuq Ivalu as an Innu elder who finds herself alone with her grandson in the aftermath of a calamity. It is 1840 and the white man’s arrival has brought new and wonderful tools — knives and needles of unimagined keenness — but also a hidden killer. Having traveled to an isolated island to dry fish for their tribe, the woman and grandson are expecting to be collected. But when no one comes, they brave the journey back to camp only to find their entire community wiped out by smallpox.

Based on the novel Før Morgendagen by Danish writer Jørn Riel, Before Tomorrow is the third in a trilogy envisioned by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn of Igloolik Isuma Productions, the duo behind Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. (They executive produce here; Cohn was DOP and one of the editors.)

But haven’t we ‘done’ the Innu? After Atanarjuat and Rasmussen, does the world really need another story from Nunavut?

Cousineau is realistic enough to know this is a genuine hurdle for filmmakers like her. Founding members of the Arnait Video Collective, Cousineau and Piujuq Ivalu have been making documentaries in Canada’s newest territory for years.

‘Working with a minority culture and their past you run up against this tendency in the modern world to consume everything in five minutes. ‘We know what they look like so that’s enough… on to the next,”’ she says.

‘This film is asking people to go beyond that, to see the film with your human soul, to go beyond folklore and be touched by the universality of the story. It happens or has happened everywhere. You can relate to those people, to the grandmother. You can put yourself in her place.’

Says Cohn: ‘People will see our trilogy as a viable statement of how the world looks to those people. Our artistic perspective is understanding how these three films represent what you might call key moments in the history of all indigenous people. Atanarjuat represents the world before time, when people lived the same way for thousands of years; Rasmussen represents the moment where indigenous people became what they are today. Looking back on the last 500 years of New World colonization, when you discover how many indigenous people there were, how many civilizations, you can’t help wondering what happened to them all. The third film tells you.’

Denis Seguin previews Canada’s banner year at Sundance all this week, continuing Wednesday with a closer look at Nollywood Babylon.