I'll be lining up to see Paul Gross and Passchendaele

Promotional Photo/Star Files

Paul Gross in scene from Passechendaele

It was great news this week that Passchendaele, the film written, produced and directed by Paul Gross, will open the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival in September. The Canadian actor also stars, playing his grandfather, Sgt. Michael Dunne from the Canadian Corps, in his film about the third battle of Ypres, also known as Passchendaele, in the rain and muck of Belgium in the autumn of 1917. In The Great War, Passchendaele was another symbol of the growing reputation of Canadians as elite fighters, but as our young country came of age there was an awful price. By the capture of the town of Passchendaele in early November, the Canadian casualty count stood at 15,654. Star movie critic Peter Howell reports Gross as saying, "Passchendaele took longer to make than the First World War to fight."

He was joking, perhaps, but it sounded as if he were obsessed by the project, thinking about making the movie for more than a decade. He could not help but understand the horror of the place from his many conversations with his grandfather. As the old man lay dying, he told Gross ... ah, but this is his story to tell and best left to the filmmaker.

Like so many other Canadians, it feels as if I, too, have been waiting my whole life for this film. (We, too, have our own family war wounds.) I brooded endlessly over films like Australia's Gallipoli, loving it, hating it and raging at the inability of Canadians to tell our own stories — especially ones revealing what it was like to be a colonized country in time of war. That's not necessarily a phenomenon restricted to the past, however that's another topic. Today, I simply wish to acknowledge what Paul Gross has done and underscore how long we've been waiting. Not that Slings and Arrows wasn't terrific (in my opinion), but Passchendaele has the potential to be a touchstone for us all.

No pressure there.

I once saw a little Australian B-flick called Emerald City, not great, but so Canadian in its story about two writers desperate to make a movie about the experience of aboriginal peoples in their country. One of the guys — the slick one with the ready patter —  goes to the States to raise money and comes back all a-twitter because he's got funding — with only a few teensy changes. Like the guy is no longer an Aborigine, but  American Black, and the setting is no longer the Australian Outback but the American Deep South.

You get the picture.

His partner quits the project, but not before delivering a speech:

"We need to feel important enough to have fiction written about us. Otherwise, we will grow up thinking real life is something that happened to somebody else, and in accents other than our own."

Those lines from Emerald City have always stayed with me.

I hardly think they will apply to long-awaited Passchendaele.