The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is full of good news these days, with the Bell Lightbox building nearly complete and the Festival a mere month away, but its most endearing storyline so far is that Torontonian Michael McGowan's Score: A Hockey Musical will be the prestigious Opening Night Gala. Quietly operating behind the scenes but very much a part of McGowan's success, is Hussain Amarshi, the CEO of downtown Toronto's iconic Mongrel Media, the distributor and one of the backers of a film that Piers Handling, Director of TIFF, praises for capturing "key elements of Canadian identity -- our passion for our national pastime, our unique musical ability and our special brand of humour."

This is the second Opening Gala triumph for Amarshi, who was the distributor and one of the key supporters of Deepa Mehta's controversial and touching drama Water (2005), about the mistreatment of widows in India. The films dramatize the duality of the studious, personable Amarshi: he is committed to his Asian past while embracing the country that represents his present and future. A respected member of Canada's film community, Amarshi has created and built up Mongrel Media, a company which successfully markets important works by artists like Mehta and McGowan that are tough sells: Canadian features, foreign art-house dramas and international documentaries.  

Over the past decade and a half, Amarshi and his company have championed critically acclaimed Iranian New Wave directors Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, documentaries like Jennifer Baichwal's Manufactured Landscapes (about Toronto-based photographer Ed Burtynsky's work) and Josh Fox's current environmental cautionary tale Gasland and films from countries as diverse as Israel -- The Band's Visit,  Kazakhstan -- Tulpan and Brazil -- Carandiru. Not easy films nor easy subjects but Amarshi has made a go of it by being eminently practical and hard-working in his approach.

"It's connecting with all kinds of community groups through flyers, postcards and new technologies," he says of his successful campaigns. "The idea is that we are bringing films we know the audiences for and creating ownership for them over these stories. When I look at a film, I'm thinking about how we'll work with communities. We work with [different] organizations and put up posters on particular streets and neighbourhoods in Toronto.

"For most of our films, Toronto is our main market and we go to specific groups to support a film. Sometimes if we don't have that direct link, we don't handle those films. What it says is that we are a Toronto company, a Canadian company, and we are reflective of our taste and audiences."

The first things you notice about Hussain Amarshi is that he is remarkably intelligent, contained and articulate. Conservatively dressed in comparison to many members of the arts and media elite, the bearded and bespectacled Amarshi exudes confidence as he connects the dots between his past life and present success.

"At first, it was just me and my little DOS laptop, back in 1994. I don't remember how much money I had, but it was very little," he recalls -- and this writer can remember visiting Amarshi, when his office consisted of a crowded front room in a house in Toronto's west Annex. His current situation is rather better.

"Now we have combined about 20 people. We have over 800 films in the catalogue. At this point we are releasing close to 40 films theatrically and over 100 films on DVD each year. When we've had the right theatrical films, we're able to support them all the way. This year, for example, we had four of the five international Oscar nominees."

Raised in Pakistan, Uganda and Zaire, Hussain Amarshi moved to Canada in 1984 to study at University of Toronto, where he received a degree in political science. "I went to Queen's after UofT ," he says, "to do my Masters. I did my coursework at Queen's and got a job at the International Centre there, that was partly funded by CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency), to do international development education. As part of that job, I thought that one way to talk about what was happening in the Third World was to show films. The Kingston International Film Festival came about -- I started that -- and that's how I got into film."

When he returned to Toronto in the early '90s, he ran the legendarily community-based and sadly demised Euclid Theatre for six months, worked as an Associate Granting Officer at the Ontario Arts Council's Media Programme and helped producer Camelia Freiberg on Atom Egoyan's Exotica and Jeremy Podeswa's Eclipse, during a very busy summer in 1993.

Deciding to go out on his own, Amarshi came up with a significant name for his venture into film distribution: Mongrel. "There are two primary influences for the name," says Amarshi. "In 1994, CD-ROMs were just coming out as a format. Non-linear presentation possibilities started becoming more viable. So one idea was that the medium was becoming mongrelized. That was partly the impulse.

"The main impulse was from Salman Rushdie and his use of the word 'mongrel' in defending [his notorious novel, which spawned a fatwa] The Satanic Verses, talking about how the world is a more mongrelized place, culturally speaking. We are from all kinds of cultural contexts; we don't come from pure cultural lineage any more.

"It's more realistic," he admits. "It was recognizing my interests. I was drawn to films that were off mainstream, and from around the world. I wanted to see more of that available in Canada. That was the drive, more reflecting what Canada was and was on the way to becoming.   That has been the philosophy all along.

"Something I thought of later was that Michael Ondaatje has a company called Mongrel Films. In fact, I had to get his permission when I finally incorporated the company a few years after. I started to use the name Mongrel Media. And that led to me putting his documentaries from the 1970s [Sons of Captain Poetry & The Farm Show] on DVD, so it all worked out quite nicely."

Today, Mongrel Media occupies the top floor of a building in Toronto's West Queen West neighbourhood, which Amarshi owns with Atom Egoyan. "Seven years ago, this neighbourhood was nowhere near what it is now," he acknowledges. "We took a risk and bought the building and redesigned it. I love the neighbourhood in every way. It has retained its creative edge. There are a lot more galleries and restaurants now. We'll see how it changes over the next five to ten years but at this point it's a very vibrant neighbourhood.  

"We knew that CAMH [Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, which has a large number of healing facilities across the street] had a master plan. Even before Atom and I bought the building we went down to [architect] Bruce Kuwabara's office and saw the master plan. It's all part of rejuvenating the neighbourhood and the philosophy behind it is perfectly sound: the notion that putting people behind closed areas is no longer necessary. It's not the old days. We have the resources to put people into normal life and to accept that not everybody's the same."

Speaking of his life, Amarshi is content. "Toronto is my home. I have no fantasies about being anywhere else. My partner, [the actor and writer] Kristen Thompson and our three kids -- this is where we've built our life."


Marc Glassman is a veteran journalist, bookseller, impresario and broadcaster. He edits Montage for the Directors Guild of Canada, POV for the Documentary Organization of Canada, is the book-buyer for the TIFF.shop for the Toronto International Film Festival, the film critic for Classical 96.3 FM and the artistic director of the literary event programme This is Not a Reading Series.