It took Indian-born filmmaker Parvez Sharma six years to shoot A Jihad for Love, a documentary about gay, lesbian and transgender Muslims in a dozen countries – and six minutes to realize work would be needed to fill houses for its Toronto theatrical run.

‘I counted only 30 people,’ a frowning Sharma says in the lobby of the Royal theater on College Street on July 18 after introducing his film, released here through Mongrel Media, and promising to return afterwards for a Q&A.

He adds that the U.S. theatrical release for his doc at New York’s IFC Center was sold out.

‘Isn’t Toronto like New York?’ Sharma asks as we sit down for an interview on a patio next to the Royal.

But as the director and former BBC producer answers my questions, Sharma delivers, with the skill of a circus barker, a lesson in how to pull passers-by into your film – in the nicest possible way.

‘It’s a great movie about gay Muslims,’ he says again and again to would-be customers as they stroll by in search of a night out on the trendy Toronto strip. Some stop inquisitively to look at the Jihad for Love posters on either side of the theater.

Sharma beams every time a couple walks up to the ticket window before disappearing into the cinema.

Sandi DuBowski, the film’s producer, comes by and is informed of the under-whelming box office.

‘Don’t worry,’ he tells Sharma, gripping a stack of leaflets for the movie. ‘We’ll hand these out at the clubs tonight,’ he adds, sensing that good box office in Toronto would lengthen the film’s theatrical life in Canada overall. (As Playback went to press, a rep for Mongrel said the film would roll out ‘slowly throughout the summer and fall.’)

That life began in Toronto last year, when A Jihad for Love had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival – to two full houses.

‘It was very triumphant,’ Sharma recalls, a smile drawing across his face.

The Toronto bow was Sharma’s first-ever festival screening. He was nervous beforehand, as he feared fireworks from critics of both Muslims and gays alike.

He needn’t have been.

After the first screening, Sharma recalls an iconic moment when, from the audience, emerged a devout Iranian woman who told him she had entered the Cumberland theater two hours earlier in a combative mood, her fists clenched.

‘But my film changed her. She told me that, as she watched the film, her fists came open, as did her heart. And she hugged me,’ Sharma remembers.

The movie itself is just as poignant. It features heart-wrenching interviews with gay, lesbian and transgender Muslims, capturing their isolation and loneliness and often-outright persecution, in part because Islamic scholars believe homosexuality is a sin.

Sharma and DuBowski, who were to participate in Q&As at the end of each of the Royal’s six screenings, had a more pragmatic reason for their herding instincts in Toronto.

Like Michael Moore and Al Gore or any savvy docmaker, they know that to get people’s attention with your film, it helps to act like you have an urgent message.

However many flyers go up on poles near a cinema, or are left in bookstores and other shops, it’s the message that breaks through.

To help get that message across at the Royal, Sharma recruited one of the film’s subjects, Arsham Parsi, a gay Iranian who found refuge in Turkey before being granted asylum and a new life in Toronto, out of fear of persecution should he return to Iran.

This is only the second time Parsi has seen Sharma since the filmmaker found him in a ‘safe house’ in Turkey, where he and three other gay men were profiled as they awaited asylum in the west.

‘[Canadian officials] asked me what my goal in Canada was. I told them: ‘A simple life,’ Parsi recalls, snugly incognito on College Street, a world away from the persecution he experienced in Iran and xenophobia in Turkey.

Sharma’s goal, meanwhile, was to make a film as transformative for all viewers as it was for the religious Iranian woman in the audience at TIFF.

‘This isn’t another tired gay film. It’s about Islam. That for me has been the starting point for discussion,’ he says.

All of which leaves a few hundred seats short of a full house, and a stack of leaflets needing handing out.

Sharma says his next film will be a subversive Bollywood musical.

‘As a filmmaker,’ he says, ‘I’ve done my gay bit.’