Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: IFC’s Sundance Selects has acquired North American rights to Trishna, the Michael Winterbottom-directed drama that stars Freida Pinto and Riz Ahmed. It has been a busy 24 hours for Jonathan Sehring and Arianna Bocco, who add this deal to yesterday’s IFC acquisitions of the Lynn Shelton-directed Toronto title Your Sister’s Sister and the gory Midnight Madness title The Incident, as well as the Abel Ferrara-directed Last Day on Earth.

A contemporized version of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, it is set in modern-day Rajasthan, where Trishna (Pinto) meets a wealthy Brit businessman (Ahmed) who comes to India to work in his father’s hotel business. They fall in love, but societal conflicts that get in the way. Winterbottom and Melissa Parmenter produced, and Bankside Films is handling international sales. This marks IFC’s fourth film with Winterbottom and fifth with Revolution Films; previous pictures include the Red Riding trilogy, Shock Doctrine, The Killer Inside Me and The Trip. Bankside brokered the deal.

“Trishna is Michael Winterbottom’s most beautiful and sensual film and features a truly sublime performance by Freida Pinto,” Sundance Selects’ president Sehring said.