According to its director Kenny Glenaan, Gas Attack is a film which follows in a tradition laid down by George Orwell. Others see it in the ground-breaking mould of Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home, whose impact led to the establishment of Shelter, the housing charity. Even the most sceptical critic would have to admit that the premiere of the drama-documentary Gas Attack at the Edinburgh International Film Festival could hardly come at a more apposite time for asylum-seekers in Scotland.

Joint-funded by Channel 4 and Scottish Screen, the film explores the havoc wrought on Glasgow’s Kurdish community by a lone terrorist, motivated by racism and armed with a supply of a deadly germ. It is launched amid continuing tension in the Sighthill area of the city, which saw the murder of Firsat Yildiz at the weekend weekend recently, followed by the stabbing of a second man two days later.

Voice Of Authenticity

But aside from the grim symmetry which accompanies its first screening, Kenny Glenaan’s film has many other unusual characteristics, not least in the director’s determination to select non-actors for the bulk of the cast. They were drawn predominantly from Glasgow’s asylum-seeking community. "The film isn’t just limited to actors because we wanted that authenticity of voice," says Glenaan. "Actors learn from non-actors. On this project we had the notion that the whole thing should feel like reportage, a kind of film equivalent of The Road to Wigan Pier."

Glenaan, 39, from Gairlochhead near Faslane, came late to film-making. He once worked as a joiner before enrolling in acting school in Edinburgh at 22. From there he went on to direct. The techniques he learned - particularly creating a community play - are brought to bear in Gas Attack. Forty-five of the cast of 60 are non-professionals.

"Making the film was a process in which we all learned from each other," he says. "Real actors had to take themselves down, the people, if you like, had to take themselves up." Throughout a long auditioning period in Glasgow, Glenaan and his casting director Vicky Beattie were exposed to an appalling catalogue of horror stories from asylum-seekers, many of which feature in the 70-minute film.

One such story is that of Benae Hassan, a 12-year-old who spent six days locked in a van as she fled Turkey. Unable to speak English at the start of the production process, she was given a tape of her words by Glenaan, learned them by rote and by the time filming ended, was speaking English fluently. Other stories which came to light during the interviewing process are more horrific still. One man told the producers he had escaped from Iraq by crossing the desert with a suitcase. Inside it was his daughter, whom he was carrying to safety.

Another refugee, now in his twenties, was one of a large community at Halabjad which was subjected by Saddam Hussein to a gas attack in the late 1980s. He only survived because his mother had made him carry a gas mask with him. When he finally emerged from his hiding place at the foot of a multi-storey car park he heard the crying of babies who, covered up by their mothers as the deadly gas descended, had survived the attack. He also found 5,000 dead.

"This is the thing with this drama; their situation is so horrific," says the film’s producer Sam Kingsley. "No-one could fail to be moved by the stories we heard, they are so very sad. We were determined to present the Kurdish asylum-seekers sympathetically."

Birth of a Notion

Kingsley was there at the genesis of the project when, with Peter Dale, Channel 4’s commissioning editor of documentaries, the notion of a study of bio-terrorism was born. When they factored in Saddam Hussein’s threat to smuggle anthrax into London and the lone terrorist responsible for the Soho nail bomb, a series of dreadful scenarios began to present themselves and the notion of drama-documentary took shape. Race, still a frighteningly divisive issue, became the obvious backdrop for the project.

Enter Glenaan, whose gritty work on the BBC2 drama series Cops, was deeply admired by Kingsley. The pair met in Glasgow, where both have offices and Glenaan fell under the spell of the subject, which continues to exert a strange fascination on the director.

Bottled Havoc

He says: "As Shirley Williams remarked the other week, why does Bush spend all that money on ‘Star Wars’, when someone could create havoc with two bottles of anthrax?"

For the director, Glasgow is symbolic in the film - the action could be set in any city in Britain or Europe. It asks peculiarly sharp questions about the national psyche. "In a Scottish context the whole issue is interesting in terms of the Scottish parliament and national identity," says Glenaan. "Refugees and asylum-seekers bring the problem to our front door."

This point aside, the timing of the film’s launch hardly diminishes the impact of a scenario which has become still more uncomfortable for everyone who worked on it. "I haven’t spoken to any of the cast yet, but I did see a number of them on TV at the demonstration on Monday," says Kingsley. "I’m sure the film is unimportant in terms of what they’re going through now, and we wouldn’t want to inflame or exacerbate the situation. However, we feel strongly that it is sympathetic to the Kurdish point of view. We hope the film will be a positive contribution to the debate."

Gas Attack, Filmhouse, Edinburgh, 22 August; Glasgow Film Theatre, 24 August. The film will be screened on Channel 4 in the autumn.