Co-directed by esteemed lesbian filmmaker Kate Johnston and actress Shauna MacDonald, this wonderful love story is filled with grace and humor.

Winner of 11 LGBT film festival awards and counting!

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“Tru Love” is not your typical love story. It’s not an earth-shattering story about two lovers who magically fall in love and ride off into sunset to live happily ever after, but it is a story that should be seen by all who have an interest in love, who seek love, who love love and who practice love.

What comes to mind when we hear the word love? We think of kissing, sex, hugs, fights, makes ups, even Webster’s definition: fondness, warmth, etc.

Don’t let the title fool you. Better yet, allow this edge of your seat, intellectually sexy lesbian film make you wonder. Wonder about life, about our definition of the word, how we see each other and how we relate to one another.

A tale of secrecy, lies, emotions and yes, true love, which should be defined as a gamut of emotions, because one who is not properly equipped when love arrives can show any emotion at any given time to express this thing called love.

Beautifully acted by lead characters Shauna MacDonald as Tru and Kate Troter as Alice. An unlikely pair, come to explore a friendship and are torn apart by Alice’s daughter, who is afraid and confused by a number of things, but ultimately the two are reunited in the end, all for Tru to come face to face with her most intimate fears.

Perhaps the scariest thing about true and indubitable love is that when you face it, it will break your heart wide open and that’s what all of us fear the most.

Dana Brenklin is a Los Angeles based radio personality, award-winning poet and musician. Her radio show, “The Dana Brenklin Radio Show,” airs Thursdays at 9am pacific on kclaFM.com. Find out more at DanaBrenklin.com or listen To Dana’s shows on demand.

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“There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” — Leonard Cohen.

“Tru Love” was shot in the winter of 2013 in downtown Toronto and on Toronto Island. The air is different in winter, everything appears to slow down and the light itself takes on a whole new quality. It defines the environment. Days are shorter. Starker. Exposed. Crystalized.

The film opens with an extreme close up of water rushing in slow motion, ice cracking and breaking up, tiny triangles of ice flying into the air — all beautifully shot by cinematographer Maya Bankovic. It’s as if the ice is dancing. This footage was taken on the first ferry from Toronto harbor, en route to Toronto Island. It is elemental, poetic and a recurring motif, during key transitions throughout the film. The score by Patric Caird is haunting, underscoring a romantic beauty, a yearning and loneliness.

The triangles of ice, of tension — Tru (friend), Alice (mother) and Suzanne (daughter), are three women, each quietly frozen in their lives. They are all yearning separately; estranged in their own way from themselves or each other, each needing to break free from constraint, to be ‘cracked open’ in their hearts, in their lives.

As the story opens and progresses, an unexpected attraction builds between Tru and Alice, and Suzanne becomes increasingly threatened. This triangle tightens, closing in on itself, compressing and colliding until it shatters like tiny diamonds of ice and explodes into a rush of emotion, eventually setting each character free.

Look for this film at film festivals throughout the summer, including Frameline in San Francisco.

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Filmmakers Kate Johnston and Shauna MacDonald dish on their film “Tru Love” in this Q&A.

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