Blockbuster Video has added eight Canadian features to its growing Festival Collection series, and will ship Eve and the Fire Horse, The Cabin Movie, Niagara Motel, Mouth to Mouth, The End of Silence, Lucid, Things to Do and Paper Moon Affair to all of its 444 stores across Canada for June 13.

The Festival Collection is a continuously updated DVD series of hidden gems that screened on the festival circuit, exclusive to Blockbuster through its partnership with Toronto’s Mongrel Media, the Canadian distributor of all the titles in the Collection.

Andre Perusse, Blockbuster’s director of entertainment communications, hopes the Collection will help silence some of Blockbuster’s critics who feel it deals too much in U.S. hits.

‘This is a diverse market with competition at every level, and it is an error in judgment not to give customers the broadest possible selection,’ says Perusse.

He adds that branding the films under the now 32-title series will also help. Foreign titles in the series include Norway’s Hawaii, Oslo and Italy’s Agatha and the Storm.

‘The Collection will be in all Blockbuster stores, and we have a special place dedicated on the new-release wall for it,’ he says. ‘Making [the films] part of what we hope will be an established brand is good for business and our customers. These are good films. We want people to see them.’

Cracked sells out

After being featured on the May 8 edition of The Oprah Winfrey Show, prodco/distributor Open Door has sold out of the 1,000 limited edition DVDs of documentary Cracked, Not Broken.

President Tom Power says 90% of the units – numbered and signed by director Paul Perrier – sold in the two weeks following the show, and that the Cracked website received 250,000 visitors within the week of the airing, about 50% of them from the U.S.

‘But we had hits from all over the world, which was amazing and really points to the reach of that show,’ says Power.

The subject of the film, Lisa – a recovering drug addict – appeared on Oprah along with Perrier and his wife, Nicol. The show also featured clips from the doc.

A standard edition of the DVD at a reduced price will be made available through the film’s website in the near future.

Also…

* The Alliance Atlantis/Universal Home Entertainment release of Trailer Park Boys Season Five did very well in its first weeks of release, placing fourth on the Nielsen VideoScan chart for the week ending May 14 – sandwiched between CG family flick Hoodwinked and comedy Rumor Has It – and ninth on the Rogers Video sales chart for the week ending May 28.

* The feature film adaptation of video game BloodRayne – coproduced by Vancouver’s Brightlight Pictures – streeted on DVD May 23 through distributor Visual Entertainment, a division of Universal, in both theatrical and unrated versions.

The two-disc DVD sets offer a featurette with director Uwe Boll, and a complete version of the BloodRayne 2 video game for PC use.

The January theatrical release of the $16-million film was met with apathy from exhibitors. Nearly 2,000 release prints were sent out by distributor Romar Entertainment, but less than half were used.