Quebec actor Karine Vanasse was six years old when Marc Lépine walked into a Montreal school, declared that he hated feminists and shot 28 people before turning the gun on himself. Lépine killed 14 women that day, mostly engineering students, but many more people were both physically and emotionally wounded. “I don’t have any memory of how I reacted,” says Vanasse, 25. Looking back, she thinks her parents probably kept the gruesome news away from her young ears that December in 1989.

Later, when she was 15, Vanasse was asked to participate in a Montreal Massacre memorial with some of the victims’ families. “I think it was really there that I realized all of the emotional effect that this event had on the families, on the people who were there,” says Vanasse. “…You could feel they were trying to mourn the tragedy and to be sad, but at the same time to deal with it together and to be united also in their pain. There was something really positive about that evening.”

Vanasse traces the beginnings of Polytechnique back to that memorial (the movie was her idea). The harrowing black-and-white film re-enacts Lépine’s (acted by Maxim Gaudette) murderous shooting at the École Polytechnique, telling the story from the perspectives of two fictional victims: engineering students Valérie, who’s masterfully played by Vanasse, and Jean-François (Sébastien Huberdeau). The whole thing is packed into 76 horrific minutes.

Valérie is a bright, ambitious student. Jean-François, one of her classmates, tries in vain to help the wounded women after the murderer’s gun (he’s left unnamed in the film) does its damage. “[We took] one side of the story that hadn’t really been told which was, for us, the point of view of the students — male and female,” says Vanesse, who’s also a producer for the film.

Twenty years later, revisiting the events of that winter is a bold move, one that created controversy even before Polytechnique came out. Some felt that it’s inappropriate to revisit the shooting in a commercial film. Vanasse says she can understand people’s apprehension, especially after so many people have tried to explain why Lépine did what he did. “People were so scared that once again, we would divide men and women and we would, once again say that feminists went too far, and that’s why Marc Lépine did this,” says Vanasse. “Or that men didn’t do what they should have done to protect our girls. But the movie’s not going there.”

Polytechnique makes no attempt at explanation. It doesn’t portray the shooting as a crime against just the women, but also the male students who couldn’t stop the killing — particularly the men who Lépine instructed to leave the classroom before he shot all the female students.

The film steers clear of Lépine’s motivations altogether, and none of his backstory is given. It was left out on purpose, says Vanasse. “When we told the families that we had the intention to do a film about the Polytechnique massacre, one of the first things that they said was that it was really important for them that the movie wouldn’t put the killer at the centre of the film,” she says. “So we really tried to respect that…. I think some people might have expected the film to answer questions and everything, but that’s not what we were trying to do.”

Still, the question of why it happened doesn’t go away, and Vanasse recognizes the importance of the questions surrounding the event. “All these debates and questions and everything, all of them were necessary,” says Vanesse. “But it felt completely different to look at and to hear about the event from the people who were there that night when I was 15 years old.” A movie about Lépine would have been “a completely different movie,” she says. “It could be done, but it’s not the movie we wanted to make.”