TORONTO — Indie queen Chloe Sevigny is used to turning heads with her stylish fashion choices, which include everything from vintage Chanel to Yves Saint Laurent and Marc Jacobs.

But she says she's never commanded so much attention as when she was in South Africa, in a nun costume, for her role in 3 Needles, Halifax-based director Thom Fitzgerald's latest work.

Sevigny, whose previous films include Boys Don't Cry and the sexually explicit The Brown Bunny, plays a novice nun working at a medical clinic in Africa, where she encounters a group of children orphaned by AIDS.

The role required her to keep her slender body and pretty blond hair covered by a stark white habit.

"Children would run after you and want to tug on your dress. It was a very empowering feeling," Sevigny said.

"The amount of respect and admiration you would see in the elders' eyes (was amazing)," recalled Sevigny, of her days on the set.

"(But) when I walked around in my Western clothes, people would snicker at my outfit. It was like night and day," said the actor, who's also in two other festival films, Mrs. Harris and Manderlay.

3 Needles, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend, features three distinct but thematically linked storylines set in China, Montreal and South Africa, where Sevigny's character Clara lives.

The Chinese storyline sees Jin Ping, played by Lucy Liu, running a shoddy mobile blood collection service which leaves virtually an entire village of unwitting peasants infected with HIV.

In Canada, a porn actor attempting to hide his HIV status ends up infecting a number of co-stars.

Written and directed by Fitzgerald, the two-hour film tackles some pretty heavy themes including the many ways AIDS continues to be spread.

"I started thinking about this question of why, at a time when all of mankind has this common enemy, why has it not served to bring us together?" he explained hours before his film's premiere.

"They always say if the aliens come, we're all gonna get together. Global pandemic sort of proves this is not how it's going to go down when the aliens come."

After the Toronto festival, 3 Needles moves to the Atlantic Film Festival on Sept. 15. The film is scheduled for theatrical release in the spring.