Chatting with Toronto actor/producer Julian DeZotti about his coming-of-age comedy New Year bowing at the Montreal World Film Festival this weekend, it”s hard not to let talk turn to a certain taboo subject: the Toronto International Film Festival.

“Because we are from just outside Toronto, we tried to get into TIFF, but it’s a very difficult festival to get into,” DeZotti explained as he readies his cast and crew for a plum August 28 evening bow at the Quartier Latin Cinema Complex.

“Our first audience will be a Canadian audience, and a cosmopolitan audience,” he added of the local Toronto pic, produced by Claudio Chiodi and aimed directly at a Generation X audience.

The low budget project, co-produced and directed by Phil Borg, was shot in Kilbride, Ontario, just north of Toronto, over ten days. New Year was then posted in Toronto with helpful hints from acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Don Shebib.

Top-lining the indie comedy is DeZotti, Joanna Douglas, Nick Rose, John Bregar and Morgan Kelly.

New Year portrays a group of friends gathering for a New Year’s Eve party one year out of university, and newly launched into adult-world jobs.

The action starts when a power blackout at midnight forces old friends to confront new and unexpected twists in their lives just as the corks on the champagne bottles are launched.

New Year results from the pens of DeZotti and Borg, childhood friends turned actors and now making their first feature film.

DeZotti conceded making a film on a shoe-string budget invites restraints.

But there’s also artistic freedom: “You found money from people you know.

And what was kind of infectious is we were able to make the film we really wanted to make, with the people we really wanted to work with.”

Of course, with artistic control comes difficulty getting New Year into Canadian theatres, much less TIFF, without a major marketing push behind the project.

Peace Arch Entertainment picked up the broadcast rights to the Canadian pic, and plans a VOD release in early 2011.

“We’ve steered away from the theatres. The financial reality is it’s best to be able to sell our film to a TV network or on-demand where we can get a return on our investment,” DeZotti explained.

When it comes to marketing New Year in Montreal, the young Canadian film producer is all about turning yet more challenges into opportunities.

“It’s about finding a way to draw in an audience, We don’t have a big movie star, or a big budget, so we have to draw attention to what we have,” he explained.

“We have to be passionate, and the more passionate we are, that impacts people and they feed off of their own passion,” DeZotti added.

New Year will be among430 films from 80 countries that Montreal has booked for its 34th edition, which gets underway Thursday evening.