Canadian doc maker Peter Raymont is piling up the air miles to put a little gold man on his mantle.

Recall Raymont and co-director Michele Hozer debuted their feature documentary Genius Within: The Inner Life Of Glenn Gould at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival.

Now Raymont is throwing the Oscar campaign for his Glenn Gould biopic into high gear by this week shuttling from Toronto to Chicago and Los Angeles to get Academy Award voters to see Genius Within and nominate it for the best documentary category.

“We’re doing the screenings that will attract an audience and buzz and reviews and the voters, who are part of the Academy Awards documentary branch,” Raymont said as he busily builds momentum for the Canadian documentary.

The lynch-pin of the Oscar campaign for Genius Within is the prestigious Lincoln Plaza Cinema in Manhattan, where specialty distributor Kino Lorber launched the Canadian film stateside on September 10 with key positive reviews from the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine.

Kino Lorber topper Richard Lorber explained the Lincoln Plaza date is key because elsewhere U.S. theatrical bookers look to see what’s playing on its six screens, and what the New York critics said about the films.

“You play at a theatre like that because the eyes of bookers who want the best films and the best presence take note, and when the reviews are as strong as they’ve been on the Glenn Gould doc, it becomes a point of high interest and establishes the authenticity of the film,” Lorber said.

But while the Lincoln Plaza launch fanned the flames for Genuis Within’s Oscar campaign, Raymont and Lorber now need to add fuel to the fire with a theatrical roll-out of the Canadian documentary onto 25 screens across the U.S. market through October and November.

So Raymont is off to Chicago for a Thursday night screening and Q&A at the Music Box Theatre.

He’ll even find time to work in a pre-screening invite-only dinner hosted by the local Canadian Consulate.

And “Four Stars!” proclaimed the Chicago Sun-Times film critic, continuing the positive reviews.

Next this Friday night Raymont will be in Los Angeles for the local premiere at the Laemmle Royal Theatre on Santa Monica Blvd., another taste-making cinema for Oscar voters.

Make no mistake: this Oscar campaign for Genius Within is a gamble.

Glenn Gould as a classical pianist is a known quantity in NYC and Los Angeles, but not in the U.S. fly-over states. And Raymont has no expensive slay-the-competition marketing campaign paid for by a studio, nor recognition for his film as serious fare that got David Guggenheim’s Inconvenient Truth, a portrait of Al Gore’s environmental crusade, recognized and rewarded by Oscar voters.

If it wasn’t for the Lincoln Plaza in Manhattan this week holding Genius Within over for a third week, you’d think Raymont misguided for mounting the Oscar campaign in the first place.

But the veteran Canadian director has been here before. His 2007 Ariel Dorfman biopic, A Promise To The Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman, which Hozer edited, bowed in Toronto before being short-listed for an Academy Award Oscar for Best documentary in 2008.

With Genius Within, deft direction led Raymont and Hozer to use archival footage and contemporaries of Gould to slowly and intimately uncover the man behind the myth of a mysterious Canadian pianist known as much for his eccentric private life as his music before his death in 1982.


And they do have in Montreal-based Film Transit International an international sales agent that has backed the project from the get-go.

It was Diana Holtzberg, vice president of USA operations at Film Transit International, that originally invited Dan Talbot of Lincoln Plaza Cinema to the original TIFF debut for Genius Within in 2009, setting up this month’s bow in Manhattan.

“Dan came and said he loved it, and wanted to show it,” Holtzberg recalled.

That backing was crucial for Kino Lorber, as exclusive bookings in prestigious theatres like Lincoln Plaza call for 35mm prints, and a certain amount of press screenings and print advertisements.

The expense of the Manhattan bow paid off, Holtzberg insists: “I went to the U.S. premiere, and I’d seen it (Genius Within) a million times on the screen during editing, but I watched for the upmteeth time, and tears come down, and it was so moving in places.”

Whether Holtzberg is a good Oscar oracle remains to be seen as she joins Raymont and his team this week in Los Angeles to take a Canadian documentary with outside status as an Oscar contender to the attention of Academy voters.