According to Variety, IFC Films has acquired the North American rights to The Preppie Connection starring Thomas Mann (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl).

President of Sundance Selects/IFC Films Jonathan Sehring said, “Joseph Castelo brings an authentic voice and deft hand to his film, and he elicits another excellent performance from breakout star Thomas Mann.”

The film premiered earlier this fall at the Hamptons International Film Festival, garnering Mann the “Breakthrough Performer Award.” Directed by Joseph Castelo (The War Within) from a script which he co-wrote with Ashley Rudden in her screenplay debut, the film is based on the true story of a prep school student who smuggled $300k of uncut cocaine into the U.S. in 1984. The script centers on Toby (Mann), a working class youth who enters an elite prep school on scholarship and finds his niche in the preppie world through supplying his fellow students with cocaine. He uses his street cred and connections to build a drug trafficking network, but gets in over his head as his sideline gets him and his friends pulled into the dangerous world of Colombian drug cartels.

Rounding out the cast are Sam Page (Self/less), Lucy Fry (Vampire Academy), Amy Hargreaves (How He Fell in Love), Ryan Ward (Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List), Hemky Madera (Tumbleweed: A True Story), Logan Huffman (Final Girl), Bill Sage (Fan Girl), Jessica Rothe (Parallels), Robert Gorrie (License Plates), and Dylan Blue (Deck the Halls).

Joseph Mensch, Adam Folk, Joseph Castelo, Billy Raftery, Charlie Bunting, Eric Schultz and Carlo Sirtori are producing. Octavius Prince, Andrew Kelley and Marisol Page are executive producers.