TORONTO – When Peter Stebbings set out to make a film about three generations of aboriginal women struggling to break a cycle of mistakes, he knew he’d have to contend with stereotypes.

But that fight against the formulaic only fuelled his drive to push “Empire of Dirt” past identity politics.

“I’d seen so many films where they were responses to being marginalized,” the actor-turned-director said in a recent interview.

“But we haven’t told the story where people just happen to be people of colour. A more universal themed kind of story. I guess that was the objective.”

The gritty Canadian drama tells the story of single mother and former drug addict Lena who, in trying to deal with her rebellious 13-year-old daughter, decides to return home and face the demons of her past — including her own mother, a recovering gambler who had kicked her to the curb.

The film — with its teen pregnancies, substance abuse and repetitive patterns of misery — turned out to be a “very illogical followup” to Stebbings’ first super-hero film “Defendor, starring Woody Harrelson, and drew much hand-wringing from his management team.

But something about the story spoke to him.

“It wasn’t quite career suicide, but there was something really underdoggy about this story,” he said. “I’ve never seen three women, native women represented on film like this before and that to me felt fresh.”

Underpinning that sense of originality, said Stebbings, is the fact that the film doesn’t try to lay blame or point fingers. Instead, it simply unravels the problems three women have to face while trying to figure out if they can function as a family.

“Really the enemy here is themselves,” he said.

For Jennifer Podemski, who plays the estranged matriarch trying to mend her relationship with her adult daughter, the film’s efforts to portray a family drama about characters who happen to be aboriginal hit close to home.

“I have always been struggling to be seen as something before my nativeness. It’s just the way humanity is. We have a habit of labelling things. I felt those labels almost diminished things,” said Podemski, who is also one of the film’s producers.

“I wanted to somehow move beyond stereotypes, move beyond labels, move beyond convention and open a dialogue of relatability.”

There’s no denying the film has a “unique cultural slant,” said Podemski, but the movie isn’t defined by its “nativeness.”

That sort of thinking was exactly what drew Cara Gee, who plays Lena, to the film.

“They’re just humans. They’re not representing anything but themselves,” she said of the women portrayed in the movie.

To hear Gee tell it, “Empire of Dirt” has the power to speak to an audience because it doesn’t lecture.

“We can hopefully through this film open people’s hearts to the human side of these things that we see in the media as issues,” explained the stage actress who is making her big-screen debut.

“Like, residential schools are a factor in this movie — it’s not talked about, it just is … you can show (the audience) hey, this is a family who is struggling with the fallout of that system.”

The film — which was eight years in the making — features Shay Eyre as Lena’s headstrong daughter and also stars Luke Kirby as an old flame.

“Empire of Dirt” opens in Toronto on Friday. It opens through the fall and winter in other Canadian cities.