NEW BROOM like all the cast members, writer, director and star Paul Gross - the guy from Due South - had to learn to curl for Men With Brooms.

The men in the film are all members of the Long Bay championship curling team which split up when its star, Cutter (Gross), suddenly left town, dumping his fiancée, Julie Foley (Michelle Nolden), and slinging the team’s curling stones into the local lake for good measure. Now, 10 years later, Coach Foley has just died trying to get the stones out of the lake, leaving a will that says he wants his ashes sealed in one of the team’s stones; he wants Cutter to resurrect the team; and he expects them to win the Golden Broom.

It is a bequest that gives Cutter a chance to come to terms with his past, and the other team members who didn’t leave to overcome - or at any rate forget - their various problems, which include jobs they hate and wives who despise them (Allodi); drug dealers who are after them to collect bad debts (Outerbridge); and having a sperm count too low to produce children (Rees). The Foley sisters, meanwhile, have moved on: Julie has become an astronaut, but Amy (Parker), a single mother battling against alcoholism, still regrets that she never made a play for Cutter. It sounds like a recipe for disaster but it turns out to be the makings of a funny, touching movie which has charmed Canadian audiences. International distribution is being handled by local powerhouse, Alliance Atlantis.

Lantos, whose distinguished production career includes such serious films as Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, István Svabo’s Sunshine, Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe and David Cronenberg’s Crash, had always wanted to make a comedy. “I’ve had my hand in some great artistic triumphs,” he says, “but the unrealised challenge of my career as a producer is to make a film that just makes audiences laugh and feel good.”

“I think the real humour is who the characters are,” adds Parker. “Essentially, what’s funny about Canadian humour is the ability to laugh at yourself. I thought it was very moving and I’ve been surprised by how sweet and funny it is,” she says - adding, however: “Except for my character - she isn’t funny at all!”

Since most of the men have to spend a lot of time on the ice, teaching them the elements of curling was obviously important. The task fell to technical consultant George Karrys, an Olympic silver medallist in the sport. Karrys soon realised, though, that he wasn’t being asked to do his usual coaching job.

“Typically in the beginning, you teach people to get the rock down to the other end of the ice and you don’t care what they look like,” he says. “But, in this case, it was the reverse. We didn’t care what the results of the shots were: these guys just had to look like they knew what they were doing!”

He seems to have succeeded in more than that, however, and several members of the Men With Brooms cast began to feel a real affinity for the sport. “If I had friends who said they were going curling Friday night, I’d be right there,” says Gross, summing it up for them all. “It’s fun. There’s nothing quite as liberating as a well-balanced slide.”