Lilly, orphaned as a child, experiences her parents homeland of England, escaping civil war. She becomes the heart of a disenfranchised community in London, where she attempts to reunite people with their families. But her friend Amira discovers Lilly’s mission isn’t purely altruistic and a passionate lost love affair is revealed between Lilly and Aziz, an idealistic doctor.

If you agree that there's no such thing as bad publicity, then Irish-Canadian co-production Sweetness in the Belly got a hefty huff of the stuff before its world premiere at TIFF. It was all thanks to accusations of "whitewashing" triggered by the fact that Dakota Fanning plays a Muslim refugee from Ethiopia.

The whole kerfuffle unfolded according to the usual pattern of social media-generated identity-politics panic. After the initial bit of exposure showing Fanning in a blue hijab prompted outrage, it turned out that the original knee-jerk denunciations were based on misguided assumptions: Technically, this wasn't a case of "whitewashing," as the character Fanning plays here was already white in the source material, a novel of the same name by Camilla Gibb.

Then the opprobrium shifted to the sounder arena of denouncing that a story grounded in recent history about people of color, especially Africans, is seemingly assumed to only be palatable to mainstream audiences if it's told through the eyes of a white person.

Which, of course, prompts pragmatists to cite how poorly many recent films, even critically acclaimed ones, anchored by black protagonists did in commercial terms unless the lead actor was already a huge star or it was a Marvel movie — and wouldn't it be better to use any means necessary to get the message across?