Director Scott Smith has taken the distribution of his debut feature Rollercoaster into his own hands, creating, perhaps, a new paradigm for emerging Canadian filmmakers.

The Vancouver-based film, which premiered at the 1999 Toronto International Film Festival and was soon after named most popular Canadian film at the ’99 Vancouver International Film Festival, is being released theatrically in Toronto and Vancouver by Smith’s Giraffe Productions, Nov. 3.

Because Smith had presold the film to cbc and TMN-The Movie Network, and used all the licence money to partially finance the $1-million production, it became impossible for the young filmmaker to access a Canadian distributor.

‘It left only so many windows for the distributor to exploit,’ says Smith.

Both broadcast deals, however, were initially conditional on Smith eventually attaching a distributor to the film, which has screened at more than 30 festivals around the world. But once the film was completed, Smith says cbc and tmn waived the condition, ‘believing I would be able to catch a distributor at the festivals.’ When that didn’t happen, Smith took matters into his own hands.

Having traveled with Rollercoaster to dozens of festivals, taking a front-row view of his audience, he managed to come up with a marketable image for the film and garner some ‘grassroots publicity.’

‘Even if this is something not everyone wants to do, it allowed us to take some control over the industry and find our audience….It’s a good lesson,’ says Smith.

The budget for releasing the film theatrically is roughly $25,000, which Smith has raised through some episodic directing gigs – including the pilot of ctv’s new hour-long drama The Associates and two episodes of Traders – all of which he landed on account of his success with Rollercoaster.

He says booking theatres was the easy part. ‘The hard part was the two months of work and the chunk of change.’

In addition to its Toronto and Vancouver release in November, the film opens in Saskatoon in December.

Rollercoaster, written, directed and coproduced by Scott, follows five teenagers from a group home on a day when two of them have made a pact to commit suicide. *