Jason Clarke in ‘The Better Angels’

New arthouse distributor Amplify has acquired the U.S. rights to A.J. Edwards’ The Better Angels, reports Indiewire.  The film is a black-and-white biographical period film focusing on the youth of Abraham Lincoln while growing up in the harsh Indiana wilderness.  The film stars Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty, The Great Gatsby), Diane Kruger (Inglourious Basterds) and Brit Marling (The East, Another Earth) and was produced by Oscar-nominated filmmaker/icon Terrence Malick.  Amplify plans to release the film in theaters sometime this fall followed by a VOD launch.

Edwards has been Malick’s protégé for the past few years, serving as an editor on The New World (2005) and second-unit director on The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012) and the filmmaker’s forthcoming Knight of Cups; this marks his feature directorial debut.  While in development, Malick was originally going to direct the project before turning it over to Edwards.  When the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past January, many critics noted the similarity of Malick’s aesthetic in the poetic period piece.  The film also recently played the Berlin Festival Festival.

Budding company Amplify was established just this year, a merger of Variance Films and GoDigital.  Other films on their inaugural slate include Terry Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem and Stuart Murdoch’s God Help the Girl.