New York Film Festival Sets RaMell Ross’ ‘Nickel Boys’ as Opening Night Movie
variety.comRebecca Rubin Senior Film and Media Reporter New York Film Festival has set the RaMell Ross-directed historical drama “Nickel Boys” as its opening night movie.
The screening will take place Sept. 27 at Alice Tully Hall. “Nickel Boys” is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel and stars Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.
The story follows two Black teenagers who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow-era Florida. Herisse and Wilson play Elwood and Turner, whose close friendship helps sustain their hope even as the horrors mount around them at the Nickel Academy, which becomes a microcosm of American racism in the mid-20th century. “’Nickel Boys’ signals the emergence of a major filmmaking voice,” said Dennis Lim, artistic director of the New York Film Festival. “RaMell Ross’s fiction debut, like his previous work in photography and documentary, searches for new ways of seeing and, in so doing, expands the possibilities of visual language.
It’s the most audacious American movie I have seen in some time, and we are excited and honored to open the New York Film Festival with it.” Ross, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” also wrote the screenplay with Joslyn Barnes.
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