A small Nova Scotia town with a big heart is being featured in a new United Nations film series about Syrian refugee settlement.

Community members in Antigonish, N.S., raised enough money to sponsor five families fleeing the war in Syria.

The Hadhad family went on to donate to the Fort McMurray wildfire relief effort, raised from their new chocolate business. Since then, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has told their success story in front of the United Nations.

"It's quite incredible to see how Canadians are coming together to bring in Syrian refugees," U.N. filmmaker Annie Sakkab told Radio-Canada on Sunday.

"The whole effort of communities coming together to help people they hardly know — they probably don't know anything about the culture — it's changing perceptions for Canadians."

United Nations filmmaker Annie Sakkab says she's found small communities embrace refugees warmly. (Stephanie Blanchet/Radio-Canada)

Cross-Canada film tour

The film series will highlight a different Canadian small town weekly from mid-November to January, filmmaker Leyland Cecco said. The goal "is to show what refugee settlement could look like in a positive way," he said.

"A lot of the focus on refugee resettlement has been in Vancouver, Montreal, and we were really curious for this series to see what it was like for Syrians to end up in smaller towns," Cecco said.

March participants formed a peace sign. (Stephanie Blanchet/Radio-Canada)

Call for peace in Syria

Several hundred people turned out Sunday for a pre-planned march, calling for peace in the bloody five-year-old Syrian conflict. The residents of Antigonish formed a peace sign by standing on the St. Francis Xavier University football field.

The march organizers, St. FX for Syria Antigonish Families Embrace Society, also launched a petition urging the prime minister to "inspire world leaders to work to achieve a peaceful solution to the civil war in Syria."

"We continue to raise funds for SAFE," the petition reads. "But we realize that we can help far more Syrians if we promote peace for Syria."

Small communities have been shown to be good places for refugees to settle, Sakkab said.

"The community is focused more on the refugees," she said. "They're willing to embrace them."