I’d never heard of Christina Piovesan when she invited me for a coffee. If you haven’t heard of her, here’s fair warning: if she invites you for coffee, go. The lead producer of Amreeka, the Canada/U.S./Kuwait copro that screened in the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes and won the FIPRESCI prize, Piovesan is a connector, a walking reminder to make friends in school and keep them close.

The product of a Palestinian mother and an Italian father, she grew up in Toronto and attended McGill University in Montreal before heading off to Los Angeles to pursue an MFA in film production at the University of Southern California. Unlike seemingly all of her classmates, she ended her first semester knowing exactly what she didn’t want to do. ‘I hated directing and I didn’t want to write,’ she says. But she didn’t drop out; rather, she became ‘a producer by default,’ working on a number of her classmates’ productions.

Armed with her MFA, she waded into the Hollywood swamp. Her first job was at the William Morris Agency. At the ripe age of 27, she was the ‘grandmother’ of the intern set, working for a senior TV and literary agent. ‘It was the worst year of my life,’ she moans: a thoroughly disingenuous statement given how undeniably useful her time at the agency was both in the short and long terms.

To wit: she landed a development job with one of the agency’s clients — film and TV producer Gina Matthews (What Women Want) — and spent a year working on television projects.

In 2005, Piovesan and a friend from McGill, Larysa Kondracki, optioned the rights to the story of a Nebraskan policewoman who volunteered to investigate sexual assaults in the strife-torn former Yugoslavia. The project, The Whistle Blower, landed at Focus Features and then went into turnaround. As did Piovesan’s career as a producer.

In 2006, she snagged a breakfast meeting with Telefilm Canada’s Dan Lyon during the American Film Market. Lyon, feature film executive, Ontario and Nunavut, didn’t think much of her pitch but pegged her as a keener and offered her a 12-week stint at Telefilm reading 50 scripts (she claims she read 80). He kept renewing her contract. Lyon, a huge Piovesan fan, tells me she was instrumental in the creative development of Young People Fucking.

All the while Piovesan was scanning film magazines to source potential filmmaking partners. She read about a young Palestinian-American filmmaker, Cherien Dabis, another MFA (albeit at Columbia University), who was trying to get financing for a film about Palestinian émigrés in the U.S.

Their Palestinian connection was just the starting point – Piovesan’s production company is called First Generation Films. ‘We were at the same place at the same time,’ says Piovesan. ‘Cherien was ready for a producer who was going to go out and fight for the story. And I was ready to find the film that I could advocate for.’

The story resonated for obvious reasons. Amreeka follows a single professional woman and her son as they emigrate from Ramallah to suburban Illinois. The ensuing culture clash is magnified by the post-9/11 jitters; never mind that mother and son are Christian.

But Amreeka wasn’t an obvious picture for the U.S. financing model. The script was 40% in Arabic and there were no ‘name’ cast members to pique the financial curiosity of the studios or broadcasters.

‘I figured ‘It’s a cross-cultural film so that’s how it had to be financed.” So she made a call to an old USC classmate, Zain Al-Sabah, a Kuwaiti who had recently launched her own production company, Eagle Vision Media Group, in Kuwait City. (Al-Sabah was the regional producer of the IMAX film Journey to Mecca.)

Eventually, Piovesan cobbled together enough private equity – a fair portion from the Arab-American community – to set up close to half the budget. They looked at shooting in Illinois, but the state tax credits were insufficient. Which is when Piovesan put her Canadian passport to work.

She consulted with Toronto producer Paul Barkin of Alcina Pictures, who recommended the tax-credit largesse of Manitoba. One scouting trip to the province and a visit with Carole Vivier at Manitoba Film and Sound and Liz Jarvis at Winnipeg’s Buffalo Gal Pictures convinced her. The city and its environs shot for Chicago and rural Illinois – along with a lightning-quick five-day shoot in Ramallah and Bethlehem. The film premiered at Sundance and then landed a slot at the Fortnight, then the FIPRESCI prize.

‘She could be a glamour babe,’ says E1 International’s Charlotte Mickie, who is handling international sales on the film, referring to an unfortunate tendency of award-winning producers to swan off into the starlight and leave the sales to the little people. ‘She’s been an enormous asset to the sales. She’s been so diligent with practical details. We wish all our producers were as helpful.’

Meanwhile, The Whistler Blower, which had been picked up for further development by HBO Films only to be put into turnaround last fall, is back on track. Indeed, it’s set to shoot in September in Hungary with Rachel Weisz in the lead.

Emboldened by her progress with Amreeka, Piovesan decided to go the independent-financing route. The film, co-written and to be directed by Kondracki, is produced by Piovesan alongside Amy Kaufman of Primary Productions and Celine Rattray of Plum Pictures. The project is being sold internationally by Voltage Pictures and UTA is selling U.S. rights.

And, by the way, Amreeka’s U.S. sales were handled by William Morris.