Days after announcing the main slate for this year’s New York Film Festival, the event’s organizers added another highly anticipated feature to its roster.
On Thursday, Film at Lincoln Center announced that Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer” will have its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 6 as a spotlight gala. The film is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s novel of the same name with a script from “Challengers” writer Justin Kuritzkes. Daniel Craig leads the cast with Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville, Michael Borremans, Andra Ursuta, and filmmaker David Lowery in various supporting roles.
“I am so privileged and elated to present a movie of mine for the third time at NYFF, ‘Queer’ in particular,” said Guadagnino in a statement. “It is a very personal movie about the inescapable quest for being recognized in the gaze of another through the lens of the great William Burroughs.”
Added Dennis Lim, the New York Film Festival artistic director, “Luca Guadagnino is one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile filmmakers, and one of its biggest risk-takers. ‘Queer’ is his most fearless, inventive, and surprising film, one that brings its subcultural world to brilliant life and creates the role of a lifetime for a tremendous Daniel Craig.”
Here’s more on the project from Film at Lincoln Center: “Written in the early 1950s yet not published until 1985, William S. Burroughs’s ‘Queer’ has come to be considered a canonical work in the career of the Beat Generation author and a cornerstone of transgressive gay literature. In his wildly ambitious adaptation, Luca Guadagnino (‘Call Me by Your Name,’ NYFF55) expertly evokes the book’s post–World War II time period and cinematically translates Burroughs’s iconoclasm with panache. In a transformative role, Daniel Craig immerses himself into Burroughs’s alter ego William Lee, a habitual heroin user luxuriating in freedom and desiccation among a disconnected group of gay American expatriates in Mexico City in the late 1940s. When enigmatic, preppy ex-military kid Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) catches Lee’s eye, he swoons into a headlong love affair, commencing an odyssey that will take them all the way to the Ecuadorian jungle in pursuit of the ultimate high. Buoyed by go-for-broke performances from Craig and Starkey, and rollicking, unexpected supporting turns from Lesley Manville and Jason Schwartzman, ‘Queer’ is a dazzling showcase for many in Guadagnino’s stable of collaborators, including ‘Challengers’ screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and music composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It’s a film that finds Guadagnino in his most formidable, gutsiest mode yet, a universal love story featuring expressionistic flights of fancy, gratifying moments of psychedelic surrealism, and surprising tenderness.”
“Queer” will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. With its U.S. premiere designation, the film will likely bypass the Telluride Film Festival but could debut at the Toronto International Film Festival under the heading of “North American premiere.”
“Queer” has become one of the year’s buzziest awards titles – particularly for Craig in the Best Actor race – but the project doesn’t yet have distribution in the U.S. nor a proper release date. That presumably could change by the fall.
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