“You have to be a bit of a hero, and that’s what I tried to focus on in this.”

So says writer and director Courtney Hunt of the main characters in her new film Frozen River, expanding its limited release this weekend. But, as the awards pile up and Frozen River takes the indie world by storm, you could be forgiven for thinking she’s talking about herself.

The movie stars Melissa Leo, best known for her work on “Homicide: Life on the Street” ten years ago, and Misty Upham, a Blackfoot Indian picked off a website, as Ray and Lila, two mothers pushed by circumstances into a smuggling ring along the New York-Canada border. Desperate for money to save their families, Ray, a working-class white woman abandoned by her husband, and Lila, a widowed Mohawk Indian with a baby that has been claimed by her in-laws, form an uneasy alliance driving illegal human cargo across the frozen St. Lawrence River.

Explains Hunt, “That they do it by getting in their car, putting whatever contraband in the trunk and driving across the mile-wide St. Lawrence River, to me that was always the driving image.”

It’s an image that Hunt pursued for three years, after her 2004 short with the same title and starring the same actresses premiered at the 2004 New York Film Festival. The positive response received by that version of Frozen River convinced her to expand it into its current 97 min. form. By 2007, Hunt scraped enough money together to begin filming the full-length River, rewarded for her years of hard work by months filming in sub-zero temperatures on location in Plattsburgh, New York. 

The story, which manages to plumb class, race, motherhood, law and order and a host of other social issues in the barren northern landscape, was Hunt’s idea from start to finish.

Says Leo, a New York native, “Until Courtney pointed this [issue] out, I had no notion of it. I wasn’t even aware that there were reservations up in the north of New York.”

Leo’s performance has already drawn resounding critical praise – Time Magazine called it “screen acting of the highest order,” and there's even early Oscar buzz. But Leo is quick to give credit to her director.

“Courtney really knows what she wants. She can’t always get it, and she finds a way to suffice when she doesn't, but she really knows what she wants,” the actress says, "And that's a great quality for a director to have."

Hunt has not been affected by the wide acclaim, and is already searching for her next project. Perhaps surprisingly for the director of a movie that deals so intensely with the plight of women trying to rise above their circumstances, she doesn’t take her own success as anything more than another step in a process. She calls the traditional male-dominance of the directing chair “just a pattern” and admits that “it didn’t take long” for her to break through the glass ceiling.

“As more women do it, it will become as normal as walking into a courtroom and seeing a woman on the bench,” she says.

Of course there’s nothing normal about a Grand Jury Prize from Sundance, just like there’s nothing normal about smuggling illegal immigrants over a frozen river, but for Hunt, moving beyond everyday boundaries in the name of something greater is very much what Frozen River is about, in her own words, “Moms and parents in general all share something, and that is that they want the best for their kid.”

“Sometimes,” says Hunt, “you have to take some risks.”

And judging by its reaction to Frozen River so far, Hollywood can’t wait for Hunt to take another.