Icelandic LGBT Horror Film Rift Lands Distro with Breaking Glass
We don’t see many horror films from Iceland, but that’s about to change because Breaking Glass Pictures has acquired North American rights to Erlingur Thoroddsen’s Icelandic LGBT/horror feature Rift. We have more details below.
Rift held its world premiere as the closing film at the Goteburg Film Festival in Sweden and will hold its North American premiere at OutFest in July. The film will have a full festival run through the holiday season, culminating with a limited theatrical release followed by DVD/VOD early in the 4th Quarter of 2017.
Set in the bleak landscape of rural Iceland in the fall, and with an LGBT couple at its core, this Hitchcockian thriller stars Björn Stefánsson, Sigurður Þór Óskarsson, and Guðmundur Ólafsson. The film’s production team includes producers Búi Baldvinsson, Baldvin Kári, and Erlingur Thoroddsen; co-producer Gunnar Helgi Guðjónsson; and executive producers James Huntsman and Todd Slater.
Rift (aka Rökkur) was written and directed by Erlingur Thoroddsen, an award-winning filmmaker born and raised in Reykjavík, Iceland. He graduated from Columbia University’s MFA Film Directing Program in New York, where he resides. Erlingur’s first feature, Child Eater, based on his short film, premiered as the Closing Night film of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival in 2016. His films have screened at several international festivals including SXSW, the Stockholm International Film Festival, the Puchon International Film Festival, and Screamfest.
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“I’m so proud of our gay horror drama, and I’m excited to see how an American audience responds to this little slice of Icelandic mystery,” said writer/director Thoroddsen. “I am thrilled to be working with Breaking Glass Pictures to bring Rift to a large audience. I’ve been a fan of theirs for years, and I couldn’t be happier that Rift has found such a great home.”
“Director Erlingur Thoroddsen has masterfully woven the elements of many different genres against the eerily bleak setting of Iceland to create a tense and stylish cinematic experience,” said Michael Repsch, SVP of Distribution & Sales at Breaking Glass. “It is exciting for us to bring another new international voice to North American audiences.”
Synopsis:
Gunnar receives a strange phone call from his ex-boyfriend, Einar, months after they broke up. Einar sounds distraught, like he’s about to do something terrible to himself, so Gunnar drives up to the secluded cabin where Einar is holed up and soon discovers that there’s more going on than he imagined. As the two men come to terms with their broken relationship, some other person seems to be lurking outside the cabin, wanting to get in.
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