Maybe you could encode it using a local encoding, something like this?:

use Encode;
$decodedLocalName = decode('utf8', $name);
$decodedLocalName = encode('iso-8859-1', $decodedLocalName);
open my $fh, '>', $decodedLocalName ...
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You said you generally have no problem with unicode filenames. Do you mean that on this same OS, similar unicode characters work in similar perl scripts, or is there something special about this case?

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