"More than 800,000 people are dead in three months and it's less important than the last Maple Leafs/Montreal Canadiens game," says Canadian filmmaker Robert Favreau on the Rwandan genocide in 1994. (Ernest Doroszuk, Sun)

Irony and tragedy sometimes seem meant for each other. It's the middle of the Film Festival, and I'm waiting to talk to director Robert Favreau about Un Dimanche A Kigali -- his film about a doomed romance set amid the Rwandan holocaust.

It's the day of the Dawson College shootings, and the director is on the phone home to Montreal seeking fresh details. He has a college-age son, who thankfully is not enrolled at Dawson.

"If he was, I wouldn't be doing this interview," he says amiably but matter-of-factly when he settles down to talk.

In Un Dimanche A Kigali, as in real life, people tried to "escape" the violence and flee to peaceful Canada. But the violence that we ascribe to "those places" isn't so contained.

But then Favreau says we Canadians have had to be quick studies in the world's nastiness -- especially after one of our own, U.N. force commander Romeo Dallaire, watched the last mass evil of the 20th Century unfold in front of him.

"We never have been a country of colonization," he says. "The French and Americans and even the Belgians react very differently from us. They know what can happen more than we do. We don't know what war is, even when we are in one."

Canada is connected to the Rwandan story in another sense with Un Dimanche a la piscine a Kigali, the international best-selling novel by Quebec journalist Gil Courtemanche about a correspondent (played by Luc Picard in the movie) and his love affair with a Tutsi waitress (Fatou N'Diaye), their romance existing in a state of denial as events overtake them and simmering hatred of Tutsis by Hutus boils over. It's a gritty, unflinching novel and a tall order to film.

"I'd just released Les Muses Orphelines -- from a play by Michel Marc Bouchard," Favreau says, "and Lyse (Lafontaine, the producer) called and said, 'I've just read an incredible book. I want you to adapt it.'

"So I read it, and my first reaction was that I was angry against myself. Where was I (in) 1994? My eyes were closed. More than 800,000 people are dead in three months and it's less important than the last Maple Leafs/Montreal Canadiens game."

"My other reaction was that it's rare for a filmmaker from Canada to be confronted with a subject so universal - the cocktail between total horror and the total joy that can happen between two human bodies. I was afraid to put myself (creatively) at the level the subject demanded."

Thus began the next six years of Favreau's life -- a period that would see him film on location, negotiate with Rwandan authorities on a regular basis over the content of the movie, and bump heads with Courtemanche over the changes he felt were needed to make a movie out of a sprawling book. Among other things, he changed the ending and made changes to make journalist Bernard Valcourt more sympathetic.

"We didn't collaborate," he says of Courtemanche. "We got together in Kigali before I began the writing and -- No!" he says with emphasis, putting his hands together in two fists.

"It didn't mesh between him and me. So I met him three times before the shooting, and each time he would just give to me his reaction and that was it.

"But at the first public screening, all his friends and family were there and they told him it was respectful. He seemed very happy with the result."

Released in Quebec, the movie grossed $1.2 million there, "quite well considering the subject," he says with a grin.

"I was hoping more than that, but after a few weeks of exhibition, many friends called me to tell me, 'I saw your film, so strong and so powerful, and I told my colleagues in my office (about it) and they would say, 'No I won't see that, it's too dark, too violent, too much suffering.'

"So to have 200,000 people see it is pretty good."