Follow this: Using Unicode in Catalyst Applications. If you make sure the layers are right on their own and you include the plugin as directed, it'll work right. If it's not working right, something is wrong in one of the layers (or something in your environment; I recently discovered for example that mysql will/can double encode if the encoding is set in the defaults file and the DBD layer). The directive INSERT had, IIRC, encoding issues in the past but if the template file's BOM is right it should be fine and PROCESS and INCLUDE never suffered from the issue (again IIRC).

(update: Make sure you configuration layer is up to date. YAML::XS for YAML, e.g., instead of something older.)