Producer Mark Selby, left, and director Barry Avrich after winning the 2025 People's Choice Documentary Award for The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue during the Toronto International Film Festival's awards ceremony on Sept. 14.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
The headline-grabbing Oct. 7 documentary The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue earned about $51,000 at the Canadian box office this past weekend, making it one of the highest-grossing documentaries to play the country’s theatres this year.
Opening on 19 screens across the country, Canadian director Barry Avrich’s film arrived in theatres after its world premiere last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People’s Choice Documentary Award. The Road Between Us, which follows one Israeli family’s experience during the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, had been the subject of back-and-forth festival inclusion at TIFF, with the film initially accepted into the lineup before being pulled, then finally reinstated with a single public screening at Roy Thomson Hall.
“This was the most emotional film we’ve ever made, and I still come back to ... this is a story about family, and not politics, for me as a filmmaker,” Avrich said onstage after the film’s TIFF premiere. “It’s a film about people who I love, and I love their story.”
The film, which was distributed in Canada via Cineplex Pictures – the distribution arm of the country’s leading movie theatre chain – had a per-screen average of $2,684, a healthier than typical number for a documentary, especially a Canadian production. At Toronto’s central Cineplex Cinemas Varsity location, which devoted its largest screen to The Road Between Us, the film bested such buzzy new releases as The Smashing Machine starring Dwayne Johnson and Anemone featuring Daniel Day-Lewis.
Earlier this spring, American director Wendy Sachs’s documentary October 8, which explored “anti-Israel sentiment” on university campuses after the Oct. 7 attacks, earned about $46,000 in Canadian theatres.
There are no details yet available for a digital release of The Road Between Us.