Allan Niblo, the producer of the film Human Traffic, will attempt to repeat the trick of its success with his new feature SW9, set in the rave and squat scene of Brixton, south London.
Instead of sneaking the film, whose soundtrack is already on the club scene, out in a handful of arthouse cinemas in London, he will launch it on 120 screens nationwide next week.
Not only was SW9 one of the first British films to be wholly privately funded, Niblo's Fruit Salad productions is also distributing it, because he believes distributors do not know how to handle small British films.
Fewer than half of all films made in the past five years got a cinema release. Speaking at the San Sebastian film festival, Niblo blamed distributors for the box office failure of a string of "really excellent" British independent films, and claimed that SW9, made for £1.2m, could begin a revolution in the way smaller films were seen.
"The success of Human Traffic taught us that distributors really don't know what to do with small films. We had to do 90% of the marketing our selves - they really did not know how to reach the young audience we knew were going mad for it. When it did take off, almost despite them, they were shocked. We have got the Orbital and Alabama 3 music from SW9 being played in the clubs and on the radio already, so people are taking about it."
He added: "This could be the beginning of something really big, like punk, where film makers take control of their own destiny just as musicians did and not only control the production but the distribution of their work too."
Amid prolonged booing and hissing, the San Sebastian film festival's main award, the Golden Conch, went to the Chilean film A Taxi for Two.
Asif Kapadia's Anglo-Indian epic The Warrior won best photography, and the Spanish documentary Under Construction won a special international critics' prize.
The feelgood French hospice love story, C'est la Vie, won best director for Jean-Pierre Ameris, while the best script went to the Belgian mockumentary The Bicycle of Ghislain Lambert.1616
