Who are we, beneath brand names, ethnic designations and man-made addictions, and how do we relate to - or, really, see - our families or broader society? Four Canadian features in TIFF2006's Contemporary World Cinema program look to digest these universal issues.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide is the scene for the $7-million A Sunday in Kigali. Before adapting Gil Courtemanche's celebrated novel, Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali, writer/director Robert Favreau (Les Muses orphelines) "read everything" on the massacre and traveled to Africa.

"I needed to see the country and feel the people," Favreau recalls. When he began casting and scouting locations in Kigali in February 2005, "those two dimensions got me very involved with the concrete reality of the country. You visit houses; the people talk about what they've been through."

The film follows fictional Quebecer Bernard Valcourt, who goes to Rwanda to shoot a documentary. Aware that rising Tutsi-Hutu tensions could provoke homicidal madness, he nonetheless stays because he's fallen in love with Gentille (Fatou N'Diaye), a Tutsi.

The responsibility of faithfully translating the horrors that overtook the country terrified Favreau. He unflinchingly shot graphic scenes, including a rape, because "a quarter of a million women lived through that."

DOP Pierre Mignot (C.R.A.Z.Y.) shot on 35mm over 38 days with a cast of 15 Quebecers, including Luc Picard as Valcourt, plus 20 Rwandans in speaking roles, 50 in non-speaking ones and 2,500 as extras. Lyse Lafontaine and Michael Mosca produced Equinoxe's first dramatic feature, which has its English-Canadian premiere at TIFF following a run in Quebec where it earned more than $1 million at the box office.

The desire to give voice to aboriginal women encouraged Métis playwright Marie Clements to ensure her play, The Unnatural & Accidental Women, evolved into a film. She mentioned the idea to colleague Jason James and he took it to Carl Bessai (Emile), who would end up directing, shooting and producing along with James.

The story, about Rebecca, an aboriginal woman searching for her mother in Vancouver's squalid Downtown Eastside, struck Bessai as "different and structurally challenging. On the one hand, you have this gritty, almost documentary-like telling of the story, and on the other hand there's magic realism."

He says Clements wanted to create a multifaceted image of women like Rebecca - an impression that spirituality, poetry, beauty and even joy find space in lives that look to be only about alcoholism, prostitution and despair. Thus the narrative of Rebecca's search triggers other plot lines, each about women doomed to fall victim to a local predator, but also featuring surreal elements that reveal other aspects of their characters.

The crew and cast for Unnatural & Accidental, as the film is titled - with Carmen Moore as Rebecca and Callum Keith Rennie in a tour-de-force turn as predator Norman - shot for 18 days in summer 2005. They logged 12-hour nights, both in the closed-off wing of a mental hospital and over two weeks on Eastside streets. Setups often had to allow for "FX builds" to enable production of surreal imagery.