‘I want us to have a great industry,’ says Stephanie Azam, the recently appointed head of Telefilm Canada’s English-language feature film productions. Not naïve but certainly enthusiastic, Azam fixes her eyes intently on the goal ahead: 5% of the box office for Canadian film. The 36-year-old Ottawa native is clearly aware that neither of her predecessors, Richard Stursberg nor Wayne Clarkson, reached Canadian Heritage’s objective for very long. (It was achieved once, in 2005 – a golden year with 13 ‘millionaire’ films, including C.R.A.Z.Y., Maurice Richard and Water.)

Still, she states confidently, ‘We’re going to reach beyond 5%. It will take two to three years. I’m excited to be building great relationships [with distributors and producers] in our business.’ She goes on: ‘We [at Telefilm] really believe we reached that 5% figure years ago if you just count eyeballs.’ Like Clarkson, Azam would like any fair assessment of Canadian audience numbers to include DVD sales, TV broadcasts and even, as befits someone who is surely a frequent flyer, ‘Air Canada viewers.’

Azam’s presence brings a breath of fresh air to the stuffy bureaucratic atmosphere at Telefilm. The Egyptian-Canadian married mother (of a four-year-old boy) exudes genuine warmth and unpretentious magnetism as she attempts to solve this country’s eternal riddle: How do you sell Canuck films to local audiences?

It helps that Azam spent six years learning the film business in a hotbed of indie distribution and marketing: New York City. She worked for Zeitgeist Films, a leading distributor of niche films in the U.S., whose successes include the Oscar-winning Nowhere in Africa, the religious documentary Into Great Silence and art films by Derek Jarman, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Guy Maddin.

‘That’s where my heart is – documentaries, foreign films, indies,’ admits Azam, before diplomatically adding, ‘That’s not to say I don’t love big box-office movies, too.’

A commerce grad who decided to ditch a banking career for cinema, Azam enjoys recalling how Zeitgeist marketed its often difficult-to-place films. Speaking of Into Great Silence, a nearly wordless three-hour doc set in a monastery, she recalls, with delight, ‘That was a tough film. Our campaign was all grassroots. We focused on the new age audience and on Catholics.

‘We sent out postcards to churches and called a huge number of Catholic organizations. And it paid off. It was the only film we ever released where the matinee showings were sold out and the 8 o’clock show times were empty. We literally had priests and nuns seeing the film and recommending it to others.’

The monks in the film sustain their order by making a famed liqueur named after their mountainous area in the Alps, Chartreuse. ‘So we threw Chartreuse parties,’ remembers Azam. ‘Zeitgeist sent cases to movie theaters that were willing to give them away. It’s an acquired taste, but there are big fans of it. I consider our campaign to be a real innovation in marketing.’

Azam successfully applied similar grassroots techniques – everything from personal appearances to t-shirts and Internet blogs – to the U.S. marketing of two of Canada’s top-grossing documentaries of recent times, The Corporation and Manufactured Landscapes ($4.6 million and $349,220 worldwide, respectively, according to Box Office Mojo).

She relishes the challenge of making Canadian features more accessible to audiences here, with expectations that they will also succeed abroad.

‘I came here as a marketing and distribution specialist,’ she says of her initial position at Telefilm. ‘When I was interviewing for that job, they said, ‘You were working in this niche stuff, how well will that translate to what we do?’ And I replied, ‘I think it’s exactly what we do, because Canadian film is indie film. It’s the exact same thing.”

Azam admits that her personal plan was ‘always, go to New York, get some experience, come back to Canada, and – hopefully – go to work for Telefilm.’ She was interviewed during the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival for the English-language marketing job by Telefilm veterans Elizabeth Friesen and Clarkson, and started work after Christmas.

Clarkson was so impressed by Azam’s approach that, after six months, he offered her one of his positions, head of English-language productions. Azam is remarkably clear-eyed in her assessment of her rapid advancement. ‘I don’t have a big ego when I’m doing this job,’ she says.

Still, it was a big leap for Azam, who had never worked in film production before taking on the job. She’s quick to point out that, ‘when scripts come in for money, there are four stages of development and I’m only involved with the last one. It’s only when producers are starting to do casting and packaging – maybe doing a final polish on the script – [that] I get involved.’

Azam gives much of the credit to the regional heads: Dan Lyon in Toronto, John Dippong in B.C., Gord Whittaker in the Atlantic provinces and Mélanie Hartley in Montreal. ‘I’m greenlighting national decisions, she says, ‘but they’re handling development from the first draft all the way to packaging before I even see it.

‘Of course, we do talk constantly about what we want to see in production. What I do is a big job, but it’s so much less big because I have strong, amazing people who are taking on the hands-on working with emerging filmmakers, developing talent, getting a script to the point that it’s ready to shoot.’

A crucial step for Azam is the involvement of a distributor in a proposed film.

‘I take the word of the distributor as key,’ she points out, ‘because they have a lot of money riding on it. The market really needs to speak. There could even be situations where I question a proposed film, but if the distributor says, ‘You’re crazy, you have to do this, this is going to make me a lot of money and it’s going to be a great film,’ then absolutely I will back it. If they’re putting a million dollars into a project, who am I to say no?’

Azam solely works on projects with large – for Canada – production dollars. ‘For budget size,’ she says, ‘we realized that there’s this dead zone between $2 million and $5 million where films just don’t perform. So we said, for national projects, the bigger the budget the bigger the box-office potential. So let’s focus on over $5 million. And the distributors agree.’

With a yearly budget of roughly $15 million and a maximum investment of 49% per project, Azam finds herself limited to supporting seven or eight projects. Of course, the regions will still invest in smaller films, budgeted below $2 million.

The Telefilm exec is enthused about a number of films being shot this year. One of them, Gunless, illustrates how Azam wants the Canadian market to change. It’s a western in which Paul Gross plays an American learning how to adjust to the Canadian frontier without weapons. Azam is already in conversation with Alliance Films, its distributor, about the film’s marketing campaign, including production of trailers to be screened months ahead of the film’s release.

‘We’re not going to hit a home run every time, but we’re always going to do our best.’ Azam’s confidence is contagious; one can only hope that the public will agree.