Not an average student comedy

• Writer/director: Jacob Tierney
• Producer: Kevin Tierney
• Production company: Park Ex Pictures
• Key cast: Jay Baruchel, Geneviève Bujold, Anne-Marie Cadieux, Colm Feore, Saul Rubinek
• Distributors: Alliance Films, Alliance Vivafilm
• International sales: E1 Films International
• Budget: $6.4 million

With his comedy The Trotsky, which premieres at TIFF, 29-year-old director Jacob Tierney provides a glimpse of a little-known piece of Canada’s cultural mosaic: English Montreal.

‘Anglophone Montrealers are in a very unique position culturally,’ says Tierney from his home in Montreal. ‘We are a minority here yet also part of the North American majority. If you are born and bred here, you become very influenced by French culture. We pronounce words and use expressions that are very different than other people in Canada,’ says Tierney, who is the son of veteran Montreal-based producer Kevin Tierney (Bon Cop, Bad Cop).

Tierney – who is of mixed Irish and Jewish descent – has been committed to carving out a cinematic space for la belle province’s largest linguistic minority since he began writing screenplays. ‘Being an Anglo Montrealer is the basis of my humor,’ says Tierney, who completed the scripts for The Trotsky and his earlier flick Twist (2004) in his late teens.

The Trotsky, which stars well-known Canadian actor Jay Baruchel, is about a young Jewish boy, Leon Bronstein, who is obsessed with Leon Trotsky – a fact which drives the film’s drama. The son of a wealthy businessman, Bronstein tries to convince his father’s workers to go on strike. His dad retaliates by banishing Leon to a public school, where he resolves to transform the student union into a real union.

‘It’s amazing that we’re shooting a movie that takes place in Montreal and is about Anglo Montreal,’ says Baruchel. ‘To watch Canadian movies, you would think that there are no English people in Montreal.’ Based in Montreal, Baruchel grew up in the same neighborhood as Tierney, and the two are close friends.

Tierney is comfortable in both French and English and believes that his generation’s outlook on life in the city is quite different from that of previous ones. Many English Montrealers abandoned the city in the 1970s after the Parti Québécois came to power. ‘We have let go of old fights,’ Tierney says. ‘There is so much that is good about living here.’

In February, Tierney starts shooting Notre-Dame-de-Grace, a darkly comic film set in post-1995 referendum Montreal and based on the novel Chère voisine (Dear Neighbor) by Chrystine Brouillet. He is also making a Montreal version of Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist with producer Niv Fichman (Rhombus Media).