I remember having a quick chat with IFC Films topper Jonathan Sehring and IFC marketing exec Ryan Werner near the end of last year’s Toronto Film Festival, and being asked what I liked that hadn’t been picked up. I said I was pretty taken with Abel Ferrara‘s Mary, which I’d seen a night or two earlier. Obviously a marginal type deal, I added, but it felt to me like Ferrara’s best since Bad Lieutenant. The costars are Matthew Modine, Forest Whitaker and Juliette Binoche.

Here it is almost a year later and after the usual prolonged wrangling, IFC has picked up domestic rights to this “long-languishing film,” as Stu Van Airsdale reports and describes on his “Reeler” blog.
Here’s another idea for IFC: as an extra on their Mary DVD, they should include Not Guilty, Rafi Pitts‘ richly entertaining documentary about Ferrara that I saw and reviewed while covering the Locarno Film Festival in July ’03. (I’d provide a link to my Not Guilty piece, but my colleagues at the site formerly know as Movie Poop Shoot have taken down my column archives.) The doc never turned up anywhere else, but it seemed quite good to me.
Stu says there’s “no word yet” on a Mary release date, “and the details do not specify whether or not IFC will be releasing via its First Take day-and-date arm.”