MONTREAL — Polytechnique, the first film to re-enact the shooting deaths of 14 female university students two decades ago in Montreal, will be released this Friday in Quebec and is already causing widespread debate.

Directed by award-winning helmer Denis Villeneuve (Maelstrom) and based on interviews with surviving witnesses, the startling black-and-white film thrusts the viewer back to Dec. 6, 1989, when Marc Lepine walked into a classroom at the Université de Montréal’s Polytechnique engineering school, told the men to leave, then shot the female students because they were ‘feminists.’ Lepine then went on a rampage before ultimately killing himself.

‘It is a memoriam,’ the actress who launched the project and stars in the film, Karine Vanesse (Ma fille, mon ange), tells Playback Daily. ‘There is a generation that doesn’t know this story,’ says Vanesse, whose partner in love, Remstar founder Maxime Rémillard, is the producer along with Don Carmody and André Rouleau.

The event left an indelible mark on Canadian and Quebec society; Dec. 6 memorials have become annual events across the country. The massacre also sparked a widespread debate about whether the shootings were the isolated act of a madman or a crime against women.

Twenty-six-year-old Vanesse says one of her goals was to explore the male perspective of the story — one she believes has been largely ignored for the past two decades: ‘Many reproached the men for not protecting the women, for abandoning in them in that classroom,’ says Vanesse. ‘But they had no idea what was going to happen.’

Although much of the film is spent recreating Lepine’s shooting spree in what at times feels like unnecessary detail, Polytechnique features a character largely based on Sarto Blais, a young male student who tried to help a number of shooting victims and who later committed suicide in despair. Lepine’s perspective is also included, although we don’t learn much more about him that we don’t know already: he was a dysfunctional loner who hated women.

As Vanesse and Villeneuve made the rounds of this province’s radio and TV talk-show circuit in the week preceding Polytechnique‘s release, the film is being talked about at length, both in the close-knit Quebec media and among ordinary people. At the heart of the discussion is whether the film should have been made and if it’s worth seeing. In side-by-side columns in Montreal’s French-language daily La Presse, journalists Nathalie Petrowski and Yves Boisvert put forward their respective arguments — she will see the movie, while he can’t bear to relive the event.

But Vanesse stands by her film: ‘Once they see it they won’t ask themselves whether or not they should have gone. It is part of our history. We tell the story in a very sober, restrained way… it’s not sensationalist.’

Funded by both SODEC and Telefilm Canada and distributed by Alliance Vivafilm, Polytechnique was shot in both English and French and will likely be released in English Canada in the coming months.