Surviving Georgia producer McLaren: I had to self-distribute or slip between the cracks

Vallance, left, and Miranda in the independently distributed Surviving Georgia

Independent producer Spencer McLaren has claimed he was forced to set up his own distribution company to ensure his film Surviving Georgia found an audience after he was unable to persuade existing distributors to take it on.

McLaren, whose film opened to a limited release at the weekend, told Encore that films that fall between arthouse and mainstream struggle to find an appropriate distributor. Surviving Georgia was directed by Sandra Sciberras and Kate Whitbread, and shot for a budget of a million dollars. It stars Holly Valance and Pia Miranda as sisters Rose and Heidi dealing with the reappearance of their odd mother Georgia (Caroline O’Connor) into their lives. The film also features Shane Jacobson and McLaren.

From his conversations with larger distributors, McLaren said: “I had one person say, ‘If you had Meryl Streep we’d distribute it.’ And I thought, ‘If we had Meryl I wouldn’t have this problem.’”