After viewing Still Night, Still Light for the first time, one of the distributors working with filmmaker Sophie Goyette handed her his copy of Andrei Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time, telling her, ‘This is yours now.’ Goyette’s incomparable movie ends on a distinctly Tarkovskian image of beauty, yearning, and delicate power, and it’s easy to see how anyone would be moved to make the connection.

But while she’s happy to rave about Krzysztof Kieślowski or the impact of seeing Paris, Texas for the first time, Goyette’s uniquely potent debut feature, opening today at the Cinematheque (February 1), is hardly the work of a film-school grad with the properly appointed Blu-ray library.

“I wasn’t that much of a cinephile,” she admits, during a call to the Georgia Straight from Montreal. “I come from a microbiology background. I studied in science, so I learned cinema by myself, by doing my shorts, and putting my own money in it. It’s not that much about influences, and I don’t want just to see films, films, films! It’s mostly life and dreams that motivate me.”

This would certainly account for the oneiric (her word) quality and the very themes we find in Still Night, Still Light, which follows three separate characters on quietly spiritual journeys across three different countries.

We can perhaps infer that Eliane Préfontaine’s inscrutably intense orphaned musician is a stand-in for Goyette. She winds up leaving Montreal to teach piano in Mexico City to the son of a seemingly prosperous man (busy Mexican actor Gerardo Trejoluna), who later travels to Beijing with his father (Felipe Casanova) in an attempt to reconnect with the remote elder. All three suffer from an unnameable sense of loss, and the film unwinds as if an emotional contagion has determined its structure.

Notwithstanding that the decision to make a debut film in three countries was utterly mad (“It was just bigger than me!” Goyette pleads. “It was the only story in my head at the time, and you feel that you don’t have a choice not to go shoot it!”), it should also be noted that the filmmaker then underplays her locations somewhat, linking them instead with a sort of diffuse, pale light and an eye for mysterious or disconcerting composition. It’s audacious to say the least, and totally beguiling.

“I didn’t want the countries to be the main characters, I wanted the characters to be the main characters, so we follow mostly them,” she explains, using the term “vases communicants” to describe the film’s subtly recursive nature. “Even at the end it seems to go back to the beginning.”

Still, Goyette’s vision of Mexico, much of it set in the wilderness outside of the city, has clearly resonated with native audiences, and validated her wholly intuitive approach to the project. The film just ended an amazing six-week run at Cinemática de México in Mexico City, where it drew comparisons to the metaphysically inclined work of Carlos Reygadas.

“It’s an older civilization than us,” Goyette offers. “I did sense with the Mexican public that they felt at home with it, even if it is unusual filmmaking.”

At the very least, the film’s success—hopefully to be echoed in its brief but sweet Vancouver run—speaks directly to one of the director’s core missions.

“If I could name my personal classics,” she says, “there are two or three films that when I saw that film, I felt for that hour and a half that I wasn’t alone in the world anymore, that the film was made just for me. I intend to do the same. Humbly, let’s say: ‘It’s for somebody else.’ And ask: ‘Where is that person?'”