With the luxury of buying for a film-going public that watches 45% non-American studio pictures (it likes independents), Jim Frazee, vp of Oslo-based Scandinavian Entertainment Group, is attending his first Toronto International Film Festival, with a mandate to purchase at least three and as many as eight titles for theatrical and video distribution for the territory of Norway.

Frazee says with nine full-time distribution companies, the Norwegian distribution situation is highly competitive, but seg has carved out a nice niche market for itself with the purchase of independent pictures that appeal to the well-educated country’s taste for eclectic movies.

seg is also a big buyer of Canadian product, with the recent acquisition of Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, and with previously purchased titles such as Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo, Lynn Stopkewich’s Kissed and Arto Parajamian’s Because Why.

‘Canadian films are perceived as independent in Norway, and they always seem to have a lot more going on creatively with less predictable stories,’ says Frazee, an ex-pat American who has lived in Norway for the past 10 years following acquisition and distribution positions in the States with some of the studios and work as a film and music journalist.

One of the traits of the Norwegian market that makes it so appealing to Frazee and seg is its penchant for picking up on independent films and making them huge hits for the territory.

‘[Norwegians] like to feel like they discover a film before anyone else, and they like to get behind a film and be its cheerleader,’ he says.

Frazee points to Smoke as an example. The film was fairly popular in North America, but in Norway it was a blockbuster and played theatrically for a year. And while the u.s. indie Kids received good notice and a decent run here, the teen audience in Norway helped it play in a few of Oslo’s 29 theaters for a full eight months.

Frazee says the recent u.k. film Shooting Fish will probably be the next Norwegian hit. ‘It had its world premiere here and now it’s sold out every night for a week, so I think this is another case where they want to feel like they discovered it,’ he says.

Perhaps the biggest issue for Frazee and seg is what films are still available for the territory. Frazee says they wanted Shooting Fish but were unable to get it. ‘We wanted it bad,’ he says.

Yet seg has done quite well with a varied list of titles since its inception in April 1996. seg titles include The Daytrippers, The Brothers McMullen, Belle Du Jour, Georgia and Devil’s Island, coproduced by parent company Filmhuset.

Besides the competition for titles another frustration for seg is the monopoly cinema system (Oslo Cinema) that is only now beginning to break up. The monopoly doesn’t allow for the competitive bid situation by theater companies in the u.s. and Canada that can be quite lucrative for a distributor.

Also presenting challenges for a marketing-driven company like seg is the inability to obtain a release date for a film three to six months in advance. ‘The community owns all the cinemas,’ says Frazee, ‘so we get slotted in and wait for screen time.’

Yet with the drawbacks that seg faces distributing in Norway come advantages, including being the country with the least penetration of mainstream American studio pictures in Europe.

‘Germany is about 90% (American product),’ says Frazee, ‘while we are about 55%, so all the other product is from other places. We have an unusually large and varied offering of film here, even though we are a country of only 4.5 million people.’

While concentrating on the independents, seg does have the ability to acquire some studio offerings. It recently picked up the $30-million, Robert Zemeckis-produced The Frighteners from New Zealand director Peter Jackson.

Frazee says his audience can handle all kinds of different pictures. ‘While they like to go and veg out and watch Speed 2, they also want to see films like Fallen Angels or a Peter Greenaway film.’

Frazee points to his work in acquisitions in the u.s. as a measuring stick of how much he enjoys buying films for Norway.

‘[Buying for the States] wasn’t interesting,’ recalls Frazee. ‘You had to be very careful. It used to be that maybe 10% of the 600 or so films made in Europe each year would make it to the States. Now that’s down to 5%. That translates to 30 or 35 films going to North America, while here in Oslo there are 100 to 120 that make it to the screens.’

Frazee also mentions that while North American titles don’t dominate the market, they are popular in Norway because everybody speaks English as a second language. Yet it’s language that makes seg’s expansion plans into the rest of Scandinavia more difficult than perhaps expected. ‘Scandinavia is a complicated territory,’ says Frazee. ‘There are five Nordic countries, with five different cinema systems, and five different languages.’

The reality for seg is that to distribute a film to all five Nordic countries would mean five differently subtitled versions of each film.

This year is the first time that a seg representative will be at tiff. Frazee explains that they usually go to the Montreal World Film Festival but will be narrowing down their presence to either Montreal or Toronto in the future. Frazee says they are leaning towards Toronto because many of the films at Montreal have already been through the festival circuit in Europe. ‘Toronto is like Venice,’ says Frazee. ‘If Toronto could somehow manage to be before Venice, it would become even more important.’

Frazee says he has plans to screen upwards of 20 films at the festival, including Vera Belmont’s Marquis a France/Italy/Spain/ Switzerland joint production, which seg bought in a presale deal. ‘I haven’t seen it yet,’ confesses Frazee. Other films on his must-see list include, Artemisia, Chinese Box, The Edge, Regeneration, Blood Oranges and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control.

As for Canadian films, Frazee intends to see Kari Skogland’s Men With Guns, Mina Shum’s Drive She Said and Max Films’ Cosmos.