I ran into this problem awhile back with Tk, and this is the solution I was handed. You need to manually decode all the filenames to ensure the utf8 flag gets set in the filesystem. Don't ask me to explain all the details, of how utf8 flags get set or ignored. :-) 
 
 #this decode utf8 routine is used so filenames with extended
   # ascii characters (unicode) in filenames, will work properly
   use Encode;
   opendir my $dh, $path or warn "Error: $!";
   my @files = grep !/^\.\.?$/, readdir $dh;
   closedir $dh;
   @files = map { decode( 'utf8', "$path/".$_  ) } sort @files;

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Tk still works, but the active developer died a few years ago. If you want or need the kind of robust filesystem reading which you described, switch to Gtk2. It is very active, and bug fixes come in a matter of weeks.

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh

In reply to Re: Tk causes problems with file paths containing non-Latin-1 chars by zentara
in thread Tk causes problems with file paths containing non-Latin-1 chars by ron7

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