For the first time in 2012, two films with Canadian connections are competing in the foreign-language film Oscar race.

The first is Canada’s official Oscar entry – the critically acclaimed Monsieur Lazhar – the second is Canadian-German-Polish co-production In Darkness, which opens in Canadian cinemas Friday.

The dark Holocaust drama began life when Toronto screenwriter David F. Shamoon saw a newspaper article about a petty thief in Ivov, Poland, who had hidden Jews in the sewers during the Nazi occupation.

“I think it was the unlikelihood of the whole thing,” Shamoon told CBC News. “Leopold Soha is sewer worker, a thief, the kind of a person who is at the bottom of the ladder. He’s not Oscar Schindler. He didn’t have any powers other than his own wits to help these people.”

Krystyna (Milla Bankowicz), left, and Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz) appear in a scene from the co-production In Darkness. (Jasmin Marla Dichant/Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media)

The result is a Holocaust film in which both the hero and the Jewish victims are morally complex, and sometimes do the right thing for the wrong reasons. The Jews hiding in the sewers include a conman and a man who has left his wife and child to save his mistress.

“By humanizing everyone, I think what you do is make it immediate. You make it something people can relate to and try to understand what they would do in that position,” Shamoon said.

Although this is his first script, Shamoon has been nominated for a best screenplay Genie. The film has three nominations for Genies, the Canadian film awards.

“It’s always been a human drama. It’s always been a story about a very ordinary man who is compelled to do the right thing and what we wanted to show is how difficult it is to the right thng – the hardships he has to overcome, not only from the obvious dangers of hiding Jews in the Nazi era, but also because he had to overcome his own prejudice,” Shamoon added.

Polish director Agnieszka Holland had an early interest in the film, based on the book The Sewers of Lvov, but she had already done a couple of Second World War stories (Europa Europa) and was not immediately convinced she should do the project.

Canadian producers Paul Stephens and Eric Jordan believed she would do the story justice and worked to get her on board, while they hooked up with German and Polish partners. Holland agreed, as long as the film was made in the original language of the story.

Then there was a last minute hitch. Canada's film agency, Telefilm, withdrew more than $1 million in funding because it was being made in Polish, German, Ukranian and Yiddish —instead of English or French as the Telefilm mandate demands.

“I would say that [going ahead] was the most difficult decision of our production life, because our German partners and our Polish partners had already built the sets – the sewer sets and we were very close to shooting, ” Stephens said.

Stephens said the Canadian producers scrambled to replace the funding, much of it coming from their personal resources.

“In retrospect, it looks like an easy decision because now it’s been nominated for an Academy Award but at the time it was extremely painful.”

The film has gone on to box office success in Europe, and especially in Poland.

“The success in Poland is just unbelievable – because it has broken every box office record. It beat out The King’s Speech,” Stephens said.