IFC fill ‘Jar’ with Icelandic thriller

It came away with top honors from the Karlovy Vary film festival, and now its first out of the buyers' gates from the Toronto film festival. Scandi-flavored thriller Jar City is the first title to find a domestic suitor at this year's fest – IFC Films will most likely put it in their successful IFC First Take label.

Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormakur (A Little Trip to Heaven) tells the tale of a desperate man employed in a genetic research institute is looking through records which might be able to explain the origin of his little girl’s brain illness. A parallel storyline develops as detective Erlendur begins investigating the murder of an old man who led a bizarre existence in his murky basement flat. This at first seemingly ordinary case becomes more complex with the mystery surrounding the death of a four-year-old girl thirty years before. Loner Erlendur, trying among other things to sort out his thorny relationship with his drug-addict daughter, is determined to find the murderer no matter what. This Icelandic thriller, which addresses issues related to the abuse of genetic information, is persuasive, above all, for the deftly spun dark and mysterious atmosphere which pervades both gradually interlacing lines of the story.

Look for a 2008 release.