Kino International has acquired all US rights to Benjamin Heisenberg’s Austrian thriller The Robber (der Rauber), which screened last week at the New York Film Festival.

The Robber was adapted from a novel that was in turn based on the real-life case of a champion marathoner who led a double life robbing banks in Austria during the eighties, usually wearing a Ronald Reagan mask.
Austrian actor Andreas Lust, last seen in the Oscar-nominated Revanche, stars.

Kino International head Donald Krim described the film as, “one of the best kind of movies; an art house thriller in which the intrigue is based on the revealed personality kinks of the main character - rather than solely based on pumped up action and grand music.”

The deal was negotiated by François Yon, head of Paris-based Films Distribution, and Richard Lorber, co-president and CEO of Kino Lorber, which incorporates the Lorber Films, Kino International and Alive Mind releasing arms.

Kino Lorber has already acquired US rights to four other titles from this year’s New York festival line-up: Lee Chang Dong’s Poetry and Sergei Loznitsa’s My Joy will be released by Kino International, while Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte and Radu Muntean’s Tuesday After Christmas will go out through Lorber Films.