IFC picks up three films at Toronto film festival

At the Toronto International Film Festival Wednesday, IFC Films acquired North American and Latin American rights to Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister.

The film distributor is also acquiring 4:44: Last Day on Earth, Abel Ferrara's movie about -- as the title implies -- the last day on earth.

Sister is about Jack, a man who is distraught over the death, one year earlier, of his brother. After he makes a scene at a memorial party, a friend, Iris, decides he should spend some time decompressing at her father's cabin on Puget Sound. Instead of finding solitude, Jack finds Iris' sister, Hannah, who is recovering from a broken heart.

Shelton wrote and directed the movie, which Steven Schardt produced.

IFC Films will release Your Sister's Sister theatrically in the summer of 2012. (Studio Canal acquired UK rights and Madman acquired Australian and New Zealand rights for the film, also on Wednesday.)

4:44, which Ferrara wrote and directed, stars Willem Dafoe, Shanyn Leigh, Paz de la Huerta and Natasha Lyonne.

It's a dark picture about what happens when the planet is about to be extinct.

A New York couple, played by Dafoe and Leigh, know they and the rest of humanity will die soon, and cycle through moments of anxiety, ecstasy and torpor. As they sink into the havens of sex and art and Skype their last goodbyes in a Lower East Side apartment filled with screens bearing tidings of doom and salvation, the film becomes one of Ferrara's most potent and intimate expressions of spiritual crisis, according to IFC.

Fabula, Funny Balloons and Wild Bunch produced the film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival this month.

Earlier in the day, IFC also picked up The Incident.