Filmmaker Ingrid Veninger is hitting the road – film ‘cans’ in hand, enthusiasm to burn, Vancouver or bust – to screen her fest hit Only to ordinary Canadian moviegoers.

Ironically, there isn’t a dime of Telefilm Canada money in the $50,000 HD production that was made on ‘maxed-out credit cards’ and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, the first stop on its international dance card that included honorable mentions at festivals in Rome, Slamdance and Sarasota, Florida.

Nonetheless, the writer/director/producer is bursting with excitement as she gets the news that she just scored $30,000 from Telefilm’s little-known ‘alternative distribution fund’ so that she can ‘4-wall’ her baby (starring her own ‘baby’, Jacob Switzer, a remarkably talented 12-year-old actor) across Canada.

For the uninitiated, 4-walling is a defunct practice that involves lugging films from one independently owned cinema to another across the country oneself. It gave way to the multiplex world and has gone the way of the dodo now that the industry has shifted to digital multiplatform distribution.

Veninger wrote, directed and produced Only with Simon Reynolds.

‘It’s kind of a throwback to older, classic cinema,’ she explains over coffee at Toronto’s trendy Spoke Club. She’s talking about the film’s pacing, which is almost in real time as two tweens pass only one afternoon together, meandering and yakking on the crossroads to teen-dom.

‘Kids from 10 to 13 are really engaged even though the pace is slow,’ Veninger explains of her target market. ‘It’s not even about first love; it’s about first crush. The teenagers are bored to death [by the film] because it’s too slow for them, but the kids love it, and the twentysomethings love it.’

Veninger underlines that this exhibition scheme is ‘not about ‘dissing’ distributors’ such as Mongrel Media, which did a ‘great job’ on Charles Officer’s Nurse.Fighter.Boy, another film which Veninger co-wrote that bowed at TIFF ’08.

This summer she plans to shoot another self-financed family tale called Modra, this time starring her 17-year-old daughter, Hallie Switzer, who is ‘facing life choices.’ Modra is both the name of the Slovak village where the filmmaker was born, and the name for the color blue.

Meanwhile, ‘life is popping,’ said Veninger as she prepared to drive her cast-filled car to Parry Sound (in true 4-wall fashion) on April 10 to kick off the Canuck tour. Next month she hops a plane to Cannes, where international sales outlet Horizon Motion Pictures takes the wheel.