Elizabeth Banks and Boyd Holbrook in ‘Little Accidents’

Budding indie distributor Amplify has picked up U.S. rights to the Sundance drama Little Accidents, the feature debut from filmmaker Sara Colangelo.  The film premiered at the Park City film festival this past January, stars Elizabeth Banks, Chloe Sevigny and Boyd Holbrook and is a Rust Belt drama set in a small American coal mining town in the wake of tragedy.  Echoing the 2013 Scott Cooper drama Out of the Furnace, the film further bolsters the fledgling Amplify as a shop interested in housing eclectic American art house cinema.  The acquisition comes three months following the premiere of Little Accidents, which has since played the Sundance London Film Festival and will be apart of the line-up of the upcoming San Francisco Film Festival.

Little Accidents, which is based on Colangelo’s short film of the same name, follows the lives of the inhabitants of a small, coal mining American town.  Still frazzled by a recent tragedy, the characters’ lives become ever more erratic after the disappearance of a teenage boy.  Banks, known primarily as comic foil in films like Zach & Miri Make a Porno, Pitch Perfect and The Hunger Games films, headlines the drama opposite Oscar nominated actress Sevigny (Boys Don’t Cry), Josh Lucas (The Lincoln Lawyer) and newcomers Holbrook (who co-starred in Out of the Furnace and will be seen opposite Ben Affleck in David Fincher’s Gone Girl this fall) and Jacob Lofland (Mud.)  Chris Columbus, the director of Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter movies serves as one of the films’ producers.

The film earned mixed reviews out of Sundance where David D’Arcy of Screen Daily, said, “Sara Colangelo’s sombre drama is a promising first feature,” while Scott Foundas’ Variety review called Little Accidents “a sensitive and well-meaning but rather ordinary melodrama that wouldn’t have seemed out of place as a network movie-of-the-week circa 1985.”

This adds yet another title from the 2014 Sundance Film Festival that Amplify has added to its slate.  They will also distribute the Sundance musical God Help the Girl and the Terence Malick-produced The Better Angels.  Amplify was formed just this year from a merger from Variance Films and GoDigitial.  The biggest coup on their 2014 schedule is Terry Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem, a sci-fi drama starring Matt Damon and Tilda Swinton that premiered at the 2013 Venice Film Festival.  As of now, there’s no word on when Little Accidents will be released.