The challenge for Alliance Films as it prepares Rhombus Media’s Blindness for an Oct. 3 theatrical release is to get past the critical drubbing the psychological thriller took as the opening-night film at the Cannes festival in May.

Yet despite its reception in France, the distributor is going back to the festival circuit for take two at the Toronto International Film Festival, hoping to secure favorable kudos for director Fernando Meirelles’ adaption of the 1995 novel by Portuguese novelist José Saramago.

Alliance has secured a prestigious ‘special presentation’ screening at the Elgin Theater for this Canadian/international coproduction, so ‘it’s well positioned,’ says Frank Mendicino, director of marketing at Alliance. ‘We will get the right crowd in that theater to have a reaction to the film,’ he says.

As part of a teaser campaign, Alliance created movie posters that each showcase a major cast member (including lead Julianne Moore) with a different ‘blind’ statement: ‘Love is blind,’ ‘Hope is blind,’ etcetera.

‘The marketing posters cut to the core of the film, which is the human condition, the emotion that we all feel – what happens to us when we react differently as human beings,’ Mendicino explains.

The poster’s bleached-out look on a white background is in keeping with the drama’s bleak portrayal of an epidemic of blindness that pushes a city to the brink of breakdown. Mendicino adds that the posters aim to resonate and linger with potential cinema-goers long after they are viewed.

Besides seizing on the film’s Canadian angle – Don McKellar adapted the novel for the big screen – Alliance aims to draw people who read the Saramago novel out to see the movie.

The TIFF screening of course aims to build media buzz ahead of the October release, which will be bolstered by a TV and outdoor media campaign. In addition, Alliance will look to lead and steer discussion among bloggers over Blindness coming out of TIFF.

What’s more, the main Blindness campaign will take full advantage of Moore, who appeals to women, Mendicino insists, and breaks through in both the art-house and commercial movie markets.

‘Women respond to [Moore]. They like her smarts,’ he adds.

Without specifying screen numbers, Mendicino says he anticipates a wide theatrical release for Blindness in Canada from Oct. 3.

The picture will be distributed by Miramax in the U.S., although no dates have been announced yet.

At the opposite end of the distribution spectrum, Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer producers Patrick White and Trevor Matthews and the horror film’s director Jon Knautz came up with a novel way to keep the marketing spend for their July 25 release down.

Their Ottawa-based production shingle Brookstreet Pictures did the release on its own.

‘We didn’t feel like anyone [we were] talking to was going to give us the theatrical that we want and believe in. Our film has a 90-piece orchestra, a 5.1 mix, and monsters. So it came down to us,’ White explains.

The trio, who privately financed the $2-million horror pic, missed getting Jack Brooks into the Midnight Madness sidebar at TIFF, but did get a booking at Slamdance stateside. That helped land a U.S. DVD deal with Anchor Bay. But still, no Canadian theatrical distributor passed muster.

So Robin Smith of KinoSmith Films, who was initially hired on as a producer rep, became a theatrical release consultant. ‘We’re calling it a co-release between themselves and KinoSmith,’ Smith explains.

Ahead of the July 25 bow, the film’s producers and Smith seeded the Internet with buzz about Jack Brooks, especially dedicated horror websites such as twitch.net and Fangoria, the magazine for indie slasher and splatter movies.

‘We’re not blanketing the web, but finding a few organizations that love and will help champion the movie. Getting onto MSN home pages costs us more money than we have for the whole marketing budget,’ which stands at around $300,000, Smith says.

White, Matthews and Knautz even went to Comic-Con in San Diego, the giant comic book and popular arts convention, to tout their Canadian movie.

Closer to the theatrical release, Jack Brooks star Robert Englund (aka Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise) did media interviews. And the props department built latex boxes with tentacles coming out of them to help promote the film in theaters.

The movie eventually opened on four screens: the AMC multiplex at Yonge and Dundas in Toronto, the AMC Kanata in the trio’s Ottawa home, Montreal’s The Forum complex, and the Granville Theater in Vancouver.

The marketing team did wild postering around the student ghetto areas in Toronto and Vancouver, and did postcards for Montreal.

Going up against competition for the teen audience with the likes of Hellboy 2 (where the Jack Brooks’ trailer ran before screenings), The Dark Knight and the latest X-Files movie, the Canadian horror pic pulled in total box office of $8,010 during its opening weekend, for a $2,003 per-screen average.