The Modest Mogul

Champion of world cinema: Hussain Amarshi, president of Mongrel Media. Photo by Steven Carty.

In a decade of producing and distributing films, Hussain Amarshi has become a big fish in the admittedly small pond of Canadian film. He sticks out in the flamboyant, showy circles he moves in, because he’s soft-spoken and dresses in muted colours. In an industry where everyone seeks attention, the president of film distributor Mongrel Media shuffles away from the limelight. Until now, precious little has been written about him — which is intriguing, considering that his Mongrel Media is everywhere.

On March 13, Amarshi will watch from his seat in Toronto’s Carlu auditorium as two films he helped fund and distribute — Deepa Mehta's Water and Ruba Nadda’s Sabah— jockey for a combined 11 Genie awards. Later this month, two other Canadian films he helped incubate — Sean Garrity’s Lucid and Gary Yates’s Niagara Motel — open in theatres across the country. Meanwhile, Mongrel continues to distribute many medium-profile international films in local markets; in March, Mongrel Media is placing The White Countess and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada in selected cinemas from Halifax to Victoria. A perusal of Mongrel’s catalogue confirms that many of the best, most memorable flicks of the past decade came to Canada courtesy of Amarshi.

Few of the films Amarshi handles are blockbusters. The former film festival programmer and art-house cinema manager has always operated at the fringes of the studio system — where the sidewalk ends, as it were. But during the last decade, with the growing popularity of foreign and independently produced films in cities across North America, the fringes have grown while the centre has shrunk. In Canada, the centre’s loss has been Amarshi’s gain, and a brief history of Mongrel Media’s progress illuminates the main non-Hollywood film trends of the past decade.

Director Atom Egoyan remembers running into Amarshi on the set of Exotica (1994), well before Amarshi had started up Mongrel. “There was immediately something about him that made you pay attention,” Egoyan says. “After talking with him, I could tell he was a passionate cinephile. But so were a lot of people, and so few of them had the tools to do much with it.”

Brought up in a family of merchants who moved between Zaire, Uganda and Pakistan, Amarshi remembers being smuggled into a Karachi screening of the restricted James Bond classic Goldfinger; he watched it, à la Cinema Paradiso, from the projection booth. “I just got to see snippets, but still I remember it pretty vividly,” Amarshi recalls. In two interviews, this is about as much as Amarshi will gush about films.

Arsinée Khanjian in Sabah. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

As a young man, he worked in advertising in Karachi before joining some family members who had immigrated to Canada. While taking a master’s degree in political science at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., in the late 1980s, Amarshi dipped his toe in the movie waters, founding a film festival that focused on movies from the developing world. “It actually went over quite well there [in Kingston], bringing films from poor places to this relatively affluent, very Upper Canadian town,” he says. “It was good to learn how to make Kingston people and students enthusiastic about seeing a film about other people who were usually different from them in lots of ways.”

After graduating, he ran the now-defunct art-house cinema the Euclid, in Toronto’s Little Italy neighbourhood. “The area was very multi-ethnic, and I first got my sense of the possibilities of the Toronto film market there.” But he had bigger plans. He started Mongrel Media in 1994, bundling short films dealing with race, culture and identity and marketing them (from an office in his garage) to film festivals and video stores.

The company’s name came from a Salman Rushdie essay defending his novel The Satanic Verses. “Rushdie said the book was a love song to our mongrel selves,” Amarshi says. “And he talked about the growing mongrelization of the world — that there is no purity any longer, and that this might be a good thing. The name made sense in a mixed-up place like Canada.”

Soon, Mongrel moved past issue-driven shorts and into features. “I saw this Tunisian film, The Silences of the Palace, at the Toronto [International Film] Festival, and I thought it should be seen by more people,” Amarshi says. “Not knowing anything about the film distribution business, I said to the sales agent, ‘If nobody else picks up the rights to this film, I will.’ It was sheer bravado.”

At first, his offer met with a polite refusal. Amarshi ran into the same agent almost a year later at the Rotterdam Festival, and she decided to take a chance on him.

He marketed Silences so well that it launched his career as a Canadian distributor of recondite international films. He often snatched up the Canadian rights to films he knew he could find a local market for — particularly Iranian (Gabbeh), Jewish (The Summer of Aviya) and South Asian (Bollywood/Hollywood), as well as gay and lesbian (Aimée and Jaguar).

“But for Hussain, a lot of these films would never have found a Canadian market,” Egoyan says. “He’s great at going into community centres and getting everyone fired up about a film.”

Amarshi tries to go beyond such niche marketing. “The core group is where you start, not where you finish,” he says. Case in point: 85 per cent of Canadian audiences for Deepa Mehta’s Water weren’t of South Asian ancestry. “In our trailer, we played on the epic feel of the story and the romance, its universal elements,” he says. By contrast, the American trailer (the film will be released stateside in the spring) emphasizes the controversies surrounding the film shoot, as well as Water’s tragic end.

John Abraham and Lisa Ray in Water. Photo Devyani Saltzman. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

It’s typical of Amarshi to forgo a controversial approach; he’s developed almost a genius for squelching furor. The film A Touch of Pink (2004) drew some criticism from Ismaili community leaders for its depiction of a young Ismaili man who confronts his mother with his homosexuality. Amarshi ignored the brouhaha, and it soon blew away. When I ask him about it now, he quickly changes the subject, evidently feeling that denial is still the best strategy.

“He’s not easily moved,” Mehta says. “There was this disastrous screening of Bollywood/Hollywood at Cannes that he went to, and he told me not to worry about it, that it wouldn’t affect the film’s success. And I think he was right; it didn’t seem to.”

Amarshi was also among the first distributors to recognize the marketability of documentaries, getting behind such films as The Corporation, The Fog of War and My Architect. When Sony Classics was casting about in 2002 for a new Canadian distributor for its arty pictures, it chose Mongrel. Last year, that repertoire included the likes of Capote and Caché.

Recently, Amarshi has begun contributing funds and editorial comments to scripts he believes in, playing a quasi-producer role in about five pictures a year. “He gave me some feedback on the scripts of both Water and Bollywood, which was valuable,” Mehta says. “He didn't want to make the project his own, but more to support my vision.” Amarshi receives many more scripts and treatments than he can green-light, but, he says grumpily, “surprisingly few of them are any good.”

There are no big paydays in Canadian film, but Amarshi’s touch, if not golden, appears at least to be silver. Grossing about $3.5 million US, The Corporation is among the top 20 highest-earning docs in history. Water, on the other hand, has pulled in a respectable $2.1 million in Canada since its November release.

Still, Amarshi’s touch sometimes fails him. A year and a half ago, he and Egoyan founded a little art house cinema and bar in Toronto's West Queen West gallery district named Camera, downstairs from Mongrel’s corporate offices. They opened the theatre with I, Claudia, a film of a one-woman play written and acted by Amarshi’s formidable wife, Kristen Thomson. But the buzz didn’t last. Unable to draw regular crowds to the screenings or the bar, Amarshi and Egoyan recently gave up the space to a tenant. “We had fun, but we neither of us made good bartenders,” Egoyan says ruefully.

In the last 10 years, Mongrel and its circumspect founder have participated in the main film trends, like the rise of niche movies and documentaries. In our increasingly mongrel nation, the emergence of a film company like Amarshi’s was perhaps inevitable.

Amarshi describes his company’s upward move as a slow, uninspired plod. But Egoyan outs his friend’s underlying passion. “He’s a cautious, solid businessman, yes, but he’s also a romantic about film’s possibilities. He wouldn’t be in this field at all if he weren’t.”

Alec Scott writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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