2024 NYFF: RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys” Selected as Opening Night Film…Heading to Telluride/Venice?

London BFI have Steve McQueen’s Blitz and San Sebastian Film Festival tied up Audrey Diwan’s Emmanuelle, we now have the NYFF folks pitching their tent naming RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys as Opening Night Film. This is not the film’s world premiere lieu so we figure Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios have either Telluride or Venice or both in their sights. This week should be a lot of fun with the TIFF folks just now dropping some big titles shortly before Venice announces their selections tomorrow. Long understood as a top contender in the Oscar race, the adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel stars Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. This film has three “it” factors going for it. Ross previously gave us the masterful Sundance preemed Hale County This Morning, This Evening — so it’ll be a noteworthy move into fiction terrain and he teamed with cinematographer Jomo Fray of All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt fame. The author also gave us The Underground Railroad — which Barry Jenkins masterfully translated for the small screen.

Adapted by Joslyn Barnes and Ross, this is about two Black teenagers who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida, achieves just this. In breakout performances that cut to the bone, 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. Nickel Boys opens October 25th.

The 62nd edition of NYFF takes place between September 27 to October 14.