Christine Haebler is living proof that those Telefilm-sponsored coproduction conferences are worthwhile. Haebler met German producer Judy Tossell at a conference in Paris a few years back and the two have always kept in touch. So when Tossell’s plans to produce Sandra Nettelbeck’s Helen in the U.S. fell apart, Tossell thought of Canada and Vancouver-based Haebler, producer of such films as Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo, Gary Burns’ Kitchen Party and more recently Peter Greenaway’s Nightwatching.

As it turned out, Haebler was being courted by Kirk Shaw of Vancouver’s Insight Productions. When she told Shaw she was going to coproduce Helen, Shaw pulled the script out of his desk drawer. He had been approached separately by one of Helen‘s German backers for financing.

As Haebler puts it, ‘And so a coproduction was born.’

A 55/45 Germany/Canada coproduction — to be precise. Helen makes its world premiere at Sundance in the Spectrum sidebar.

Written and directed by Nettelbeck (Mostly Martha), the film stars Ashley Judd as a pianist and music professor suffering from clinical depression. Goran Visnjic of TV’s ER co-stars as her husband, while Canadian actress Lauren Lee Smith (Normal) plays a gifted student confronting her own demons. Other Canadians in the cast include Alexia Fast, Alberta Watson and David Hewlett.

Haebler says Nettelbeck originally wanted a 50-day shoot, an astonishingly long shoot in the independent world — ‘It’s hard to get that to work within the commerce of indie filmmaking’ — and talked her down to 40 days. But, she says, ‘On the first day we started we understood why we needed so much time. There were slivers of story that were extremely subtle to handle properly. Moments, emotions, looks, the detail in the performance is extraordinary.’ In the end, Nettelbeck squeezed out an extra five days, close to her wish.

‘It’s how she shoots,’ says Haebler. ‘She’s extremely detail-oriented, very ‘old school’ in a way.’

The production filmed in the autumn of 2007 and part of February 2008 in Vancouver and then posted in Germany. Warner Bros. Germany is distributing the film in Germany. No Canadian theatrical distributor is in place, though it will air on W Network, Super Écran, TMN and Movie Central.

Tossell and partner Jens Meurer’s Berlin-based Egoli Tossell Film has been behind a number of high-end art-house titles, including Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark, Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, Michael Caton-Jones’ Shooting Dogs and the upcoming historical biopic The Last Station, starring Christopher Plummer as the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.

‘It was an excellent personal and creative collaboration,’ says Haebler. ‘We’re looking to do something together again.’