RaMell Ross’ ‘Nickel Boys’ To Open New York Film Festival
deadline.comRaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys will be the Opening Night of the 62nd New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall on September 27, the fest’s parent organization, Film at Lincoln Center, revealed today.
The adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel stars Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson in the story of two Black teenagers who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow-era Florida.
In the harrowing tale inspired by actual events, their 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.
Their breakout performances “cut to the bone,” says NYFF. Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor also star. “Nickel Boys signals the emergence of a major filmmaking voice,” said the festival’s Artistic Director Dennis Lim. “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.
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