Political strategists like to say that politics is retail. Despite the big ad budgets and televised campaigns, it’s the good old fashioned hand shaking and baby kissing that actually swings votes. As we gear up for Cyan’s next film release, we’re branching a bit outside of industry norm, and betting along the same lines.

We’ll be releasing the film fairly broadly for an indie movie – in NYC, for example, on five screens. So a big win for us would be a $10k per screen average opening weekend. That would set up the film for easy national expansion with strong theater chain support.

Again, $10k average, fairly broad release. But hitting that means, for the New York screens, getting just 5000 people in all of New York City to see the film. Just five thousand!

Given the relatively small size of that number, and given that we’re opening the film initially in a finite number of cities (four the first weekend, eight more the next), we’re betting it’s practical – and potentially hugely helpful – to work retail politics in every single one of those cities.

So, this week, we’ve been pulling together ten-person street teams in each of those cities, and lining up bulk orders of postcards stapled to silk-flower leis (as the film is about a Fijian family in New Zealand), enough to hand out 10,000 of them in each city in front of theaters, churches, nail salons, anywhere and everywhere we think we might find movie-going members of our target demographic.

Sure we’ll also be driving our standard print, online and radio publicity and advertising pushes. And, given that we’re a degree removed from a successful sale (you buy tickets from theaters, not from us), it may prove nearly impossible for us to determine which route is actually putting butts in seats.

Still, we think it’s worth the effort. Do what everyone else does, and you get what everyone else gets. Which, in the world of indie film distribution, sadly isn’t too much.