The sun is so bright that Molly Parker, pale and lightly freckled, looks nearly translucent.  She is sitting on a restaurant patio in downtown Toronto, just off a plane from the Edinburgh Film Festival, and is feeling the time difference, she says, but you can't tell.  There is nothing grumpy or irritable about Parker, who is gracious - she has a star smile - if reserved, even a little suspicious of the whole process.  In Edinburgh, Parker, who just turned 27, was talking ("and talking, and talking," she says wearily) about her part in Michael Winterbottom's guerrilla-style study of South London, Wonderland.  Today - with the Toronto International Film Festival in full swing - she gets to talk about it again, just as she did at Cannes, as she did on a recent London junket.
    The Toronto festival is a triple-header for the actor from Pitt Meadows, B.C., outside Vancouver.  In the next few weeks, she'll field questions about Wonderland, the highly acclaimed Five Senses, directed by Jeremy Podeswa, and which debuts tonight at the festival, and the epic István Szabó film Sunshine, in which she plays Ralph Fiennes' wife.
    The kind of films Parker chooses are more likely to end up at festivals and rep theatres than in multiplexes (she turned down a role in Godzilla); and so this jet lag and this omnipresent questioning have become de rigeur.
    Parker lists her festival stops of the past few years: "Sundance, Cannes, one in Spain.  I've been to the Sudbury Film Festival and that was really fun," she says.  "I like the small ones because there's not that much press to do, so you can actually go to movies."
    Parker's first foray on the festival treadmill was in Toronto in 1996, with Lynne Stopkewich's film Kissed.  Her ghostly performance as a necrophiliac was a hit, earned Parker a best actress Genie.
    "That was the first festival I was involved in, except for when I used to buy tickets to the Vancouver Film Festival," she says.  "I saw Kissed for the first time in the Uptown to a full house.  I remember feeling so anxious, and incredibly excited."
    Even as she says this, Parker is not overly effusive.  There is something disciplined about her, perhaps from her years as a ballerina or her training at Vancouver's Gastown Actors' Studio.  She has the same contained quality on screen that she has in real life, except perhaps, on the CBC series Twitch City where her character - who inconceivably pursues the slothful TV addict played by Don McKellar - seems just a little out of it.  "She's the one character that doesn't have much of me in her," admits Parker.
    Her three roles in this year's festival span three countries and as many accents.  In The Five Senses, she plays a young Toronto mother whose daughter vanishes; in Wonderland, a pregnant Londoner in marital crises; in Sunshine, a doomed Jew in Second World War Hungary.
    "I think I have an actor's face.  I know I can look really plain and nondescript but given the right makeup and confidence, I can look starlet-y," she says.  "But I'm not traditionally a babe, and that allows me to do different things."
    Although those "things" aren't mainstream, Parker claims she's not deliberately fashioning an identity as an independent film icon in these indie-friendly days: "I just pick the best writers.  I don't care if the film is independent or not.  Usually the scripts choose me."
    Sunshine, says Parker, chose her.  Szabó ("A very  generous man.  He seemed so happy to have us there"), the Hungarian director of Mephisto, had Parker fly to London for a screen test with the notoriously reserved Fiennes.  Despite being "nervous beyond belief," she landed the role (although not the one she had tested for), and on her first day on set, she stopped before walking in the door and had a little conversation with herself: "I remember having to lecture myself, saying It serve me if I'm intimidated.  It doesn't serve the character if I'm intimidated."
    The Budapest shoot was long, and emotionally trying.  "There's one bit in the script where a woman is taken down the shore of the Danube and shot and killed, her body thrown in the river," says Parker.  "The night I got there, I was really jet-lagged.  I woke up in my hotel room and looked out the window facing that same river.  It was raining.  I found it incredibly emotional to look at this architecture, the buildings that had witnessed what had happened."
    Sunshine, which lands at the festival with at least one other high-profile film on the subject of the Holocaust (Robin Williams' Jakob the Liar) might find itself at the centre of the same debate as last year's hit, Life is Beautiful, which was loathed by a number of critics.  Much of the negative reaction seems linked to a long-debated question from academia that has filtered into the mainstream.  Can the Holocaust be represented?    How can artists be up to the task of depicting the unspeakable?
    "I haven't seen Sunshine yet, so it's hard to know if people will [find it controversial].  But it's not a movie about the Holocaust.  It's about family."  Parker halts, then starts over.  "I guess I understand what they're objecting to.  It's hard to even talk about, you know, my 'acting process' while we're sitting here in a café. It's absurd."
    From Hungary, Parker went directly to London from Winterbottom's Wonderland.  Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo) shot the movie on 16-millimetre film with no set or stage lights, wandering into clubs and restaurants like a documentary filmmaker with cast in tow.  The actors didn't wear makeup and much of the script was improvised.  The result is a grainy, staccato look at a sad and beautiful urban England.
    Until Edinburgh, Parker had been spending most of her time at home in Toronto and fishing with her boyfriend.  But the festival circuit is calling again and she's starting to prepare for a new feature that reunites her with Stopkewich.
    "I'm actually excited about this festival," says Parker.  "I can't wait to see Sunshine and I have a Canadian film [The Five Senses] here, which is wonderful.  I feel like lately I've ended up doing work all over the world so this is a nice opportunity for people I know to come and see my stuff in Canada.  I want them to know that I haven't disappeared."