Hydra is probably on thousands of lists of “Places to Visit Before You Die.” The 21-square-mile Greek island rises steeply out of the Aegean Sea to a focal point, the 2,000-foot summit of Mount Ere. The principal town, situated on a crescent-shaped cove, is made up of whitewashed houses and tavernas, all topped with terra cotta–tiled roofs. Locals fish for sponges and build boats, minor vestiges of a major maritime trading tradition. In the past 50 years, an artists’ colony has sprung up there, attracting the likes of author Henry Miller (Hydra has “a wild and naked perfection”) and poet-songwriter Leonard Cohen (“the wind brings you the sound...three young men, their arms about each other’s shoulders, singing magnificent close harmony”).

Around 2003, movie and television director Jeremy Podeswa also went there on an artistic pilgrimage, as he puzzled out how to make a film of Anne Michaels’ 1996 book, Fugitive Pieces, some of which is set on Hydra (or Idhra, as it’s also known). “I wanted the place to inspire me,” he says animatedly, “to really understand why she had set [part of] the book there.” Despite a dearth of roads on the remote island, he decided he’d have to shoot there. And when Podeswa wants something badly enough, he’ll do almost anything to get it. Even if it takes years.

And so, for a month in the spring of 2006, an international crew and cast, summoned at great expense, converged on Hydra to shoot a segment of Fugitive Pieces. “The set deck, the props, the lighting, the cameras all had to be carried by hand or donkey all the way up a big hill,” Podeswa recalls. “There were all these donkeys weighed down with the Panavision equipment.” It was an ambitious shoot to be sure, which was in keeping with the overall ambition of the film’s director and the scope of his latest project. The 45-year-old Podeswa, who has long held the un­official title of Canada’s most promising film director, had yet to realize his full potential. Despite his drive to become an auteur, over the course of 20 years, he’d made only two features: the uneven and overwrought first, 1994’s Eclipse, and the more accessible and accomplished second, 1999’s The Five Senses.

But his real breakthrough came in television, as director for hire on such critically acclaimed shows as Rome, The L Word and Six Feet Under. So here was someone well-versed in the world of episodic TV, adapting what had widely been considered an unfilmable book, with an $11-million budget (his biggest by far), lesser known actors, and donkeys and mules for transportation. For now, it appears the gamble (and his collaboration with esteemed producer Robert Lantos) has paid off: Fugitive Pieces has been awarded the opening night slot at the Toronto International Film Festival. But will Podeswa transcend the world of television and finally take his place among Canada’s top-tier film directors?

On most weeknights growing up in his family’s modest North York home, Jeremy Podeswa could be found in front of the television. He’d lie on the floor doing his homework and watching programs like Soap, L.A. Law and Green Acres. But he wasn’t just a TV junkie. His dad, Julius, a painter, introduced him to the cinema, and foreign fare from the likes of Roberto Rossellini and producer J. Arthur Rank. The young Podeswa would go to the city’s then numerous art house cinemas twice a week, taking in films by Federico Fellini and Robert Bresson, as well as a diet of Hollywood classics. “I saw everything on offer at the Bloor Cinema, the Fox, the New Yorker, Cinema Lumiere,” he says, reciting the theatre names as if they were exotic cities once visited and never forgotten. His devotion to both the high- and lowbrow has continued to the present—and sets him apart from most contemporary filmmakers, who fall on one side or the other of this great divide.

The Podeswa household was an orderly and religiously observant one—his parents once decided not to attend one of his film’s TIFF premieres because it fell on a high holiday. If Julius sparked an enthusiasm for film and painting (using art history texts), his mother, Ruth, kept the home filled with the aromas of her kosher cooking and made a reader of her boy. After graduating from CHAT (the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto), he decided to formalize his love of movies and studied film at Ryerson. There, using some of his student loan money, he made his first movie, the 1983 short David Roche Talks to You About Love, a 22-minute performance film in which a gay actor does just what the title suggests. “I saw David do this one-man show onstage, and I immediately had this feeling,” Podeswa recalls. “I’ve learned since how rarely that feeling comes upon you, so when it does you have to act on it.”

The result premiered at TIFF and won a handful of prizes on the international circuit. It was broadcast in Canada and abroad—all in all, a strong start for a student, and it demonstrated Podeswa’s knack for making someone else’s vision palpable through film.