Every family has its maverick – the one who travels the world looking for the meaning of life, who escapes the pressures to conform, who asks the hard questions and remains self-governed against all odds.

Among film distribution folks in Canada, Mongrel Media’s head honcho Hussain Amarshi is just that. Amarshi has remained fiercely independent, nimble, and worldly in a marketplace that too often values clout over culture.

In his own soft-spoken but passionate style, Amarshi has grown Mongrel into one of the most distinct distribution houses in the country, without giving up an ounce of ownership or control in the 15 years since he launched.

The little distrib that could is now the bigger little distrib that has, with more than 700 feature film titles in the library, 10 of which are showcasing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

‘We’ve been building it one film at a time,’ says the 46-year-old Amarshi, who still holds dear the picture that started it all. It was Silences of the Palace, a Tunisian film (written and directed by Moufida Tlatli) he’d stumbled upon at TIFF in 1994 when stumbling upon films at festivals was still de rigueur.

‘I was completely touched by it and felt compelled to have it seen by more people,’ he recalls. At the time, the sales agent said Harvey Weinstein was looking at it, which immediately put off the then very green Amarshi, who had yet to try his hand at feature film distribution. Back then, it was all docs and shorts for the political science graduate who had founded the Kingston International Film Festival at Queen’s University five years earlier, in an effort to bring film from developing nations to Canada.

A few months later at the Rotterdam festival, he came across the film again – only this time big Harve was out of the picture. The sales agent told Amarshi to draft up a contract, and with no minimum guarantee and zero experience, he won the English Canada rights to his first theatrical feature film release.

From then on the modus operandi at Mongrel has been ‘to bring the best of world cinema to Canada and to bring the best of Canada to the world,’ says Amarshi, who grew up in East Africa and Pakistan, but has called Toronto home for the past 25 years.

Passion for the product continues to play a big part in his acumen, ‘but,’ he points out, ‘it’s tempered by market realities.’ With 20 staff in his downtown Toronto office, feeding the pipeline is paramount.

‘I don’t have to love every film,’ he explains. ‘Some are passion projects and some have marketability. It’s our job to walk that fine balance.’

Success for Amarshi is matching a film with its potential audience. Marketing is key, but for Mongrel, ‘how a film is marketed, what to spend on P&A and how to spend it is an art… We are on top of our spend on a week-to-week basis, we don’t tend to work on the marketing six months ahead. We take more of a wait-and-see what presents itself [approach].’

For 2002’s Bollywood/Hollywood, for example, a beautiful poster of Lisa Ray inspired the team to do a bus-shelter campaign, not the other way around. Michael McGowan’s One Week, a recent Canadian film success for which Mongrel spent $1.2 million on P&A, was all about pre-show hype and driving traffic months before its launch, but the elaborate media strategy was as much driven by the audience as it was followed by the Mongrel team.

Not afraid to take a gamble, Mongrel played up the Canadian angle of the $1.9 million feature, and used the Internet – including a $20,000 website, YouTube trailers and social media – to generate excitement and involvement among the younger demo it was targeting, for at least four months before the March 2009 release. More than 80,000 people had seen the trailer before the film’s debut, which did $1.4 million in box office and is cleaning up on DVD.

But most noteworthy is that the entire Mongrel team worked on the film – a complete collaborative effort to get an audience to take notice.

‘We are able to compete when we release a film, when we can really massage it,’ says Amarshi. ‘Having not spent as much money and being in tune with the local market give us the competitive advantage.’

Amarshi also believes that continuing to seek out great international films at a time when North America has all but closed the door on foreign-language pictures is vital to Canada’s multicultural identity. He’s particularly excited these days about the ‘vibrant films’ coming out of Iran, Romania, Israel and Argentina. Explains Amarshi: ‘Most great art gets produced in difficult situations.’

So where does that leave Canadian films? ‘We buy five Canadian films a year and we’re continuing to build on that,’ he says.

Unfortunately, with shrinking TV revenues and diminished funding across the board, the domestic production community is turning to more copros as a means to bigger budgets. ‘But copros don’t speak to an audience,’ explains Amarshi. ‘And when we don’t stay targeted at a local audience, and we don’t see our stories brought to light, we are shortchanged.’

Spoken like a true cinephile and citizen of the world.

ET CETERA…

• The name Mongrel Media came from a Salman Rushdie essay defending The Satanic Verses

• Amarshi originally aspired to work in advertising, doing a short stint in Karachi, Pakistan before immigrating to Canada

• The film he is most proud of is Deepa Mehta’s Water

• Mongrel Media is not for sale and ‘can’t be bought,’ says Amarshi, who intends to stay put until he retires

• Amarshi doesn’t read magazines, with the exception of trades like, um, Playback