My Big Fat French Lesson.

That’s how Kevin Tierney describes the film that’s landed him in the director’s chair for the first time: a $6.3 million bilingual comedy about five English speakers sent to a unilingual French town in Quebec for an intensive French Immersion program

‘The story is basically along the lines of Hello mother, hello father, here I am at Camp Grenada (A Letter From Camp),” Tierney told Playback Daily, referring to the popular song released in the early 1960s. ‘The first week they hate it and want to leave and by the second week they love it and want to stay. It’s very sophisticated.”

The film’s official title is French Immersion, but Tierney, who co-wrote the script with Jefferson Lewis (Emotional Arithmetic) clearly revels in the comic possibilities of the film’s subject matter. In fact, he admits that he spends much of his time on set laughing. ”I’m not sure if that’s a good sign. But I’m having a great time.”

Tierney has attracted much star power, including Gavin Crawford (This Hour Has 22 Minutes), Laurence Leboeuf (Durham Country), Pascale Bussieres (Nothing Really Matters), Colm Feore (Bon Cop, Bad Cop), Jacob Tierney, Martha Burns (Slings and Arrows), Karine Vanesse (Polytechnique), and veteran Quebec rocker Robert Charlebois, who plays a federal Senator with much power in the small, fervently nationalist Quebec town. Bussieres plays his daughter.

Lewis originally came up with the idea after picking up his sister-in-law in Jonquiere, Quebec after she completed a French Immersion program. ”She talked to me non-stop about how draconian it was. They couldn’t speak a word of English. I found it hilarious, so I went back and did some research.”

Like Tierney, Lewis describes the film as summer camp for grown-ups: ‘When you are forced to learn another language as an adult, and you can’t speak your own language, you are helpless, like a baby waiting being fed.’

Both Tierney and Lewis also wanted to take a comic stab at a sacred political cow in this country: the relationship between English and French Canadians. For example in one scene Charlebois quips ‘I love Canada, I just hate the English.’

‘It is good to get the things people say privately out in the open and laugh at them,’ says Lewis, adding that SODEC, which kicked in $850,000 to finance the film, initially rejected the project. ‘Some readers thought it was anti-francophone. They viewed us as English people writing about French-people, but Kevin and I don’t feel like Anglos, we are Quebecois.’

The film is produced by Tierney and Claude Bonin (Cruising Bar 2). Over $3 million of its financing comes from Tierney’s production envelope from Bon Cop Bad Cop. TVA films will release French Immersion across Canada July 11, 2011.