Days after the stormy screening of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, a film that fiercely divided critics, two major deals have been concluded on the film.

TrustNordisk has found a UK buyer with increasingly voracious distributor Artificial Eye. The film has also gone to the US to IFC, which has been on a mini-buying spree of Cannes competition titles.

Earlier this week, some distributors expressed severe misgivings that they would be able to release the film in the version shown in Cannes, which includes shots of genital mutilation and the ejaculation of bloo as well as penetrative sex.

However, Von Trier has already prepared a “nice Catholic” version in which the four most extreme sequences have been excised The version here in Cannes is “the naughty Protestant one”.

An upbeat Peter Aalbæk Jensen, co-boss of Zentropa, which produced the film, said that the distributors that have acquired bought the film can release either version.

Aalbæk Jensen said that TrustNordisk had received “one of the highest prices we have got in many years” from the UK for Antichrist.

He also revealed how Von Trier had changed the screenplay for Antichrist after Aalbæk Jensen inadvertently gave away the ending to journalists. He added: “the element of female being Satan was not part of the first film. Satan was nature. Actually, I think we got a much better film out of me telling the ending…even if Lars punished me by making Manderlay.”

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