Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor

Source: Trae Patton / @ A.M.P.A.S

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor

The 62nd New York Film Festival (NYFF) will open with Ramell Ross’s awards season hopeful Nickel Boys on September 27.

The adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel stars Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.

It tells the story of Elwood and Turner, Black teenage friends who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida.

Amazon MGM Studios’ Orion Pictures will release Nickel Boys in US theatres on October 25. Ross and Joslyn Barnes adapted the screenplay, and the producers are Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, David Levine, and Barnes. 

Ross’s previous film, the documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, played in the 2018 New Directors/New Film programme.

Dennis Lim, NYFF artistic director, described Nickel Boys as “the most audacious American movie I have seen in some time”.

Orion Pictures and Amazon MGM Studios present a Plan B Entertainment, Anonymous Content, and Louverture Films production. 

The 62nd edition of the festival has been extended by one day and runs September 27–October 14. Todd Haynes’s May December opened last year’s event.