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The Film: An ensemble piece which explores the romantic, social and sexual lives of a cast of emotionally-challenged characters living in New York City, Shortbus is as poignant and emotionally sincere as it is explicit. And that's saying something.

While some early critics speculated the film would never get mainstream distribution, ThinkFilm picked up the picture after it screened at Cannes. With a certain X rating, however, the screen will only get so much exposure. “Obviously it's a small film,” the director John Cameron Mitchell said at the TIFF press conference, “not that many people will see it, but we hope that everyone who does starts a band, or makes some art, or uses the internet for good, i.e. to meet another person face to face.”

The Hype: The film opens with an image of a man fellating himself. (The actor, Paul Dawson, actually trained for months to achieve the feat.) And yes, the actors have real sex on camera. But for all the naughty buzz, the sex is not particularly erotic or titillating in any way. Rather it quickly becomes a kind of window dressing to off set the real issues of the film, which are actually downright shmoopy. Think love, relationships, and the million dollar question: Are we all ultimately alone in this world?

The Process: Instead of casting in the conventional manner, Mitchell placed ads in various periodicals asking people – trained actors or not – to submit interview tapes describing a sexual experience that was meaningful to them. Forty people were chosen for the audition stage and asked to fly to New York at their own expense. The audition turned out to be a huge game of spin the bottle. The following day the cast watched each other's audition tapes and were asked to rate each other's level of sexual attractiveness in a secret ballot from one to four.

Once the core cast of nine were selected, Mitchell and his cast moved into a loft for five weeks and performed a myriad of trust exercises and collective script-creation processes. “Every kooky cliché you can imagine, we tried it,” says Mitchell.

In developing the story with the cast (there was no traditional script per se), Mitchell first encouraged the cast to develop characters, then moved into improvisation. The material was discovered collectively and later turned into fully written scenes.

The Director: You might remember John Cameron Mitchell as the drag-queen rocker star of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. In Shortbus he stays behind the camera.

The Star: Canada's own Sook Yin Lee stars as Fiona, a buttoned-up sex therapist who strikes out in search of her own big O. The role nearly cost Lee her job at CBC (she is the host of Definitely Not the Opera on Radio One), but the network backed down when luminaries such as Yoko Ono, Michael Stipe and Francis Ford Coppola rushed to defend Lee's right to artistic expression.