As far as Robin Smith is concerned, now is the best time to release Up the Yangtze, fresh off a successful screening at Sundance and ahead of the tentpole releases in April and May.

Writer/director Yung Chang’s acclaimed doc — scooped up by U.S. distributor Zeitgeist Films one day prior to the Park City festival — bows Friday at Toronto’s Cumberland theater, and will move to Vancouver next week, followed by Montreal and Ottawa. It examines the repercussions of China’s Three Gorges Dam project — and specifically how it affected a peasant family living along the Yangtze River.

The buzz is ‘quite nice,’ says Smith, who heads up indie distributor KinoSmith Films. The Toronto-based company is co-distributing the doc with the National Film Board, which produced Yangtze with Montreal’s EyeSteelFilm.

The doc was recently named one of Canada’s Top Ten films by the Toronto International Film Festival Group, and also won the best documentary prize at Vancouver’s film festival.

Smith notes that presently there are not too many documentaries in the marketplace.

‘It’s also enough time after the Christmas rush that everyone’s seen the big Hollywood blockbusters by now,’ he adds.

KinoSmith and the NFB have been working on their release strategy for ‘quite a while,’ according to Smith, which is part of the reason they stuck to their own schedule, rather than go day-and-date with the Zeitgeist release in the U.S., which will be in April.

‘We had a lot of great things in place already, and didn’t feel that it was going to hurt the film if we released now…also because of the great buzz coming out of Sundance,’ he says. The distributors organized advance screenings at Hot Docs and the Real Asian Film Festival for Yangtze, in addition to some outsource marketing through various community groups.

Smith says the NFB, which has the DVD rights, will likely wait to see how the film opens before it plans for a home video release.

‘If it’s successful, we don’t have an approaching DVD date to worry about. If it underperforms, then [the NFB] may look at releasing the DVD sometime in the summer,’ Smith adds.

Yangtze will face other small releases, including Carl Bessai’s drama Normal, starring Carrie-Anne Moss and Callum Keith Rennie, which bows in Toronto and Vancouver via Mongrel Media.

Odeon Films will open the British action-comedy In Bruges, starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as two hit men, in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. The same goes for Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show, which will also bow in Calgary.

Among new U.S. releases opening wide are the comedies Fool’s Gold, starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, from Warner Bros., and the Martin Lawrence-starrer Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, from Universal.

Upcoming DVD releases on Feb. 12 include the acclaimed U.S. doc Maxed Out, handled here by Mongrel, and the ensemble comedy series The Festival, from Filmoption International. Produced by Montreal’s Philms Pictures, it airs in Canada on TMN/MC and in the U.S. on the Independent Film Channel.

Meanwhile, Alliance Films has set tentative release dates for domestic titles including Denys Arcand’s Days of Darkness, which is slated for an English Canada release on March 21. Kari Skogland’s The Stone Angel is set for May 9, followed by Blindness, penned by Don McKellar, on Aug. 8.

Paul Gross’ war drama Passchendaele — originally set to arrive in line with Remembrance Day — has been moved ahead a month and is now set to bow on Oct. 10.