RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys will be the Opening Night film of the 62nd New York Film Festival, taking place September 27 to October 14, 2024.
Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor star in The adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2019 novel, about two Black teenagers who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida.
Ethan Herisse and Brandon 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.
The film is adapted by Joslyn Barnes and Ross, whose Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (Closing night of New Directors/New Films, 2018) portrayed an Alabama community in moments of revelatory intimacy, cinematography by Jomo Fray (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt), editing by Nicholas Monsour (Nope).
Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios will release Nickel Boys in theaters on October 25 expanding through the fall.
“What an absolute honor for Nickel Boys to open the 62nd New York Film Festival… a daydream really, for the crew, the cast, and team who’ve committed so wholeheartedly to its vision,” said Ross. “It feels almost full circle, given Hale County This Morning, This Evening’s selection in 2018’s New Directors/New Films program. The New York Film Festival in particular constellates much of what one aspires toward through filmic production. Since just after my undergrad when I was wooed by the still and moving image, it has been an extraordinary compendium for global aesthetics.”
“Nickel Boys signals the emergence of a major filmmaking voice,” said Dennis Lim, Artistic Director, 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.”
Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the 62nd edition of the New York Film Festival has been extended by a day, and now takes place September 27–October 14, 2024.
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