With feature documentaries demonstrating impressive box office in recent years, distributors have become increasingly careful – and clever – when releasing non-fiction fare.

Some distribs are building word of mouth on the festival circuit, tying their films to current events, while others look more to the DVD market than a theatrical release for revenue.

ThinkFilm believes its self-financed Murderball can play big at the box office, and the Toronto distrib has shown a knack for being right. Its release Born into Brothels won this year’s best doc Oscar, and has taken in nearly US$3 million at the North American box office as of April 7.

Murderball, which grabbed the 2005 Sundance American Documentary Audience Award, focuses on a form of rugby played by paraplegics, and will open this year’s Hot Docs ahead of a July 15 commercial release.

Jeff Sackman, president and CEO of ThinkFilm, sees his challenge as convincing moviegoers that the doc is about more than paraplegics tossing a ball around.

‘It pulls out an emotion like movies are supposed to,’ he says of the crowd-pleaser.

Festival and test screenings for Murderball have elicited a single marketing strategy: get as many people as possible to see the film to build buzz for the theatrical launch.

‘The more it gets seen and exposed, the better it will do,’ Sackman says.

The festival circuit has also been central to the release strategy for the National Film Board doc What Remains of Us, about Tibetans risking arrest by viewing a digitally taped message from the Dalai Lama.

NFB director of communications Laurie Jones recounts how the media played up security guards stationed outside the film’s world premiere at Hot Docs 2004 to ensure no spectators were bringing in recording devices, to protect the identity of Tibetans featured in the film.

But the downside of this publicity, according to Jones, is that ‘the security became the film’s leading story, much to the chagrin of the filmmakers, who wanted very much to have the film’s story told.’

More free press came as the Hot Docs bow coincided with the Dalai Lama’s Canadian tour. The film was released in Montreal through the NFB after it created headlines at Hot Docs and at Cannes, and more recently Seville Pictures opened it in eight markets outside of Quebec.

The strategy appears to have worked. So far What Remains of Us has amassed an overall box office of almost $500,000 in Canada and was picked up for the U.S. by Seventh Art Releasing.

From the headlines

Also taken from the headlines, Peter Raymont’s Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire, about the retired lieutenant-general’s experiences in Rwanda during the genocide, went the festival route and snagged a Sundance Audience Award of its own. Through small Toronto distrib Microfilms, the film has screened in seven markets nationwide, mostly at rep houses.

‘I didn’t want to blow our brains out on a theatrical release,’ insists Microfilms founder Glen Wood. Wood says Microfilms has its eyes elsewhere, adding, ‘We’ve secured a reasonable and realistic release to fuel the [March 1] DVD release.’

Sometimes positioning a doc as more a cause than just a movie gives juice to a project’s theatrical and DVD life. The perfect example is The Corporation by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, which became the highest-grossing Canadian doc of all time last year, taking in more than $1 million at the local till for Toronto’s Mongrel Media.

Katherine Dodds, director of strategy and communications for The Corporation, says the polemical documentary aimed for political impact from the start. The doc, which critiques corporate behavior, tapped into activist groups including The Council of Canadians and Amnesty International early on to help spur debate on how to ‘reform, regulate or rewrite the corporate form,’ says Dodds.

Likewise, with the current DVD release, activists are being encouraged via the Internet to host or attend a ‘Corporation house party’ to pick up DVDs and support materials to encourage corporate reform.

Hoping to tap into a zeitgeist of another kind, Seville released The Chiefs, about a goony semi-pro hockey team out of Laval, QC, on the rep circuit on Feb. 16. It happened to be the very day the National Hockey League announced the cancellation of its 2004/05 season owing to a labor dispute.

Director Jason Gileno says the release date was a gamble.

‘Had the season gone on, we would have been buried in the media,’ Gileno recalls. ‘Without the season, everyone was hungry for hockey and wanted to see anything about hockey.’

The theatrical run, which included Toronto’s independent Bloor Cinema, was geared primarily toward drumming up publicity for the film’s March 15 DVD release. Seville reports that it has so far moved nearly 8,000 units.

And then many docs never catch distributors’ attention, and so call for an entrepreneurial grassroots release by the filmmakers.

This was certainly the case for Calgary’s Aaron James Sorensen, director of the quirky Hank Williams First Nation, about a native elder and his grandson who travel around the American south to investigate how Hank Williams really died.

Sorensen screened the film on his own in Alberta towns and cities to build awareness ahead of a slow release in eastern Canada this summer. Whereas many Canadian films open in Toronto and then spread nationally, Sorensen has done the reverse.

‘We’ve opened in small-town Alberta and [plan to make] Toronto our last stop,’ he says.

The privately financed film has so far brought in $50,000 from four prints, with Sorensen handling his own marketing and media.

Also helping the cause is a movie-poster tagline tugging at westerners’ heartstrings: ‘Here’s a Canadian film that doesn’t stink and you haven’t already paid for.’