For filmmaker Mary Mazzio, it’s always been about beating the odds. And as she has shown numerous times in her life, it has less to do with talent than with desire and hustle.

“I was an entrepreneur in training and I didn’t know it,” Mazzio says, sipping tea in a lobby restaurant in New York’s Palace Hotel. “It’s the hustle. That’s what you need and what these kids have. If you can’t sell an audience of investors, if people are not excited about your product, nothing’s going to happen.”

That’s been true of her documentary-film career – and it’s true of the subjects of her latest outing, “Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon,” which opened in limited release Nov. 13 and will continue to platform through the end of the year.

Mazzio’s film follows a dozen semi-finalists as they head for the finals of the national competition put on by the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE). The students involved were all at risk of dropping out of school – until they found relevance in a program that forced them to apply themselves to such scholastic basics as reading, writing and mathematics to create a viable business plan for a new product or service. The “9” in the title refers to the fact that a student drops out of high school in America every 9 seconds.

“The kids who drop out think the education they’re getting is not relevant to them,” says Mazzio, 48. “So you take this and other programs like this, where a kid sees, Hey, I need basic algebra to be a businessperson. They become energized about it. It’s a way to teach an application for the basic building blocks of education. It’s effective and transformative and it’s keeping kids in school.

“They have programs built around music and athletics and debate. What about kids without those talents or skills? There are lots of innovative programs but they have to be relevant. This is about getting kids excited about learning.”

Mazzio understands excitement – and battling odds. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Georgetown Law School, she was a nonathlete who wound up rowing varsity crew in college, just through sheer force of will. Though she’d never had success in most sports (“I always wanted to be an athlete but I’ve got no eye-hand coordination – my sister was the athlete”), she was spotted by the crew coach at Mount Holyoke, because of legs strengthened by years of dance, and encouraged to try out.

The try-out included a run around a lake on campus: “I was dead last,” Mazzio recalls. But she pushed herself and, by the end of the first week of practice, she’d worked her way into a spot on the team. It was the same when, almost a decade after college, she went out for the American crew team for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.

“I tried out for the national team and was cut three times,” she recalls. “But I was the Energizer Bunny – I just kept going. And I was in the Olympics.”

When she returned from Barcelona, she felt enlivened by a new sense of purpose. Though she was a fourth-year associate at a prestigious Boston law firm, she needed something else to give her life a meaning it had lacked.

“I wasn’t doing enough – I said to my husband, ‘I can’t go back to my day job,’” she recalls. “If I was going to do something, it was either going to be on the policy level of politics or through film.”

Politics scared her: “I was clean as a whistle, metaphorically speaking, but I was so concerned about the invasive nature of politics,” Mazzio says. “When I decided on film school, my husband convinced me to go part-time, while I kept working at the law firm.”

At first, she tried writing screenplays – and got them looked at by producers in Hollywood. But then – nothing. So she took a film-school exercise and turned it into her first nonfiction film and focused on the documentary route.

“Ten9Eight” is her fifth film and, like much in Mazzio’s life and career, it reached theaters through an unconventional route. She found her subject when she showed her previous film, “Lemonade Stories,” and was approached afterward by Steve Mariotti, head of NFTE. “Lemonade Stories” was a documentary about successful entrepreneurs (Richard Branson, Russell Simmons and others) and the impact their mothers had on them.

“Steve said, ‘Let me tell you who I’m working with,’ and, as he described working with kids, I thought, This needs to be a movie,” Mazzio says.

It took her five years to come back to the idea but, once she did, she knew she had to get it out where high-school students could see it and it could have an effect. She devoted months to trying to interest various independent studios (“I spent six months waiting for Sony Classics to say no”) and, when that didn’t work, decided she didn’t want to wait the extra months to go the film festival route and take a chance on finding distribution there. So she got entrepreneurial.

“I worked my Rolodex and, as it turned out, a friend of a friend was on the board of AMC,” she says, referring to the national theater chain. “So I talked to them and it turned out they were looking for a new direction, with content that was inspirational. They watched the film and loved it. So they asked whether I’d be willing to enter into an exclusive relationship.”

Which mean that “Ten9Eight” opened in eight cities in AMC theaters last Friday: “And in their best high-grossing theaters,” Mazzio says. “And they’ve got 150 trailers in eight markets. That’s unheard of – a documentary like this in multiplexes. They’ve got our one-sheets up everywhere. For an independent filmmaker, that’s an exciting proposition.”

She’s also made deals with BET and Viacom for broadcast rights – and a further deal with Scholastic for a book to go with the movie. There’s talk of a TV series

“I’m taking a page out of the kids’ playbook,” Mazzio says. “It’s all about the hustle. Being an entrepreneur is not confined to having or operating a business. It’s about creating opportunities out of dust, about overcoming obstacles.

“This is all about capturing the attention of the kids. That’s who I made the film for. This is not a solve-all. It’s one tool. But if one kid comes out thinking differently about his future, about what he’s capable of, about staying in school – well, that’s worth the whole shooting match.”

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