Yet another player has emerged in Canada’s distribution sector with word that veteran producer Nicholas Tabarrok is launching Boutique Films in partnership with Toronto entrepreneur John Kozman.

In an interview with Playback Daily, Tabarrok — who has produced features including The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico and Weirdsville through his Toronto shingle Darius Films — says he’d been mulling a move into distribution for many years, and got the ball rolling around the same time that ThinkFilm was sold to U.S. investors, at the end of 2006.

‘I felt like maybe there’s a vacuum [in distribution] and decided to explore those options a bit more,’ he says on the phone from Los Angeles.

He acknowledges that the vacuum has since been ‘filled several times over’ with new distributors including Maximum Films and Entertainment One, but he says there’s room for one more.

‘Even with it being just as competitive as it was, if not more so, we still think we bring something to the table, coming from a producer background,’ says Tabarrok, who shares the title of co-president with Kozman, whom he met two years ago at a conference. Kozman exec produced the 2007 romantic comedy Jack and Jill vs. the World, which Darius developed with L.A.-based Empera Pictures.

‘It comes down to picking good projects…there’s always room for quality,’ Kozman notes, adding Boutique strives to be a more ‘filmmaker-friendly’ distributor. ‘We’re going to be a transparent partner,’ he says.

The first order of business for Boutique, which will share Darius’ offices in Toronto and L.A., will be acquiring titles at the Sundance Film Festival, which starts on Thursday. The company plans to distribute both international and Canadian productions, with a focus on homegrown projects.

‘We’re actively looking for product…something with some profile that will help establish Boutique as a company with a taste for interesting films that audiences will want to see,’ Tabarrok says, adding that Boutique will have a better sense of how many titles it will carry following Sundance.

The distributor has already made several acquisitions, including the comedy Cooper’s Camera, starring husband-and-wife team Jason Jones and Samantha Bee, best known for their work on The Daily Show. Warren Sonoda (Ham and Cheese, 5ive Girls) directs.

According to a recent story in The Globe and Mail, ThinkFilm is close to a deal to sell its remaining Canadian assets to Entertainment One, freeing up dozens of domestic titles which have been in limbo for more than a year.