News from Venice, Toronto, and New York
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Venice won’t announce its lineup until tomorrow, but as if propelled by some newfound energy, this week has already bolted right out of the gate with announcements from Toronto and Venice Critics’ Week as well as word from Film at Lincoln Center that RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, will open this year’s New York Film Festival. The committee awarding the book the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction called it a “spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow–era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity, and redemption.”
Nickel Boys was cowritten with Joslyn Barnes—an accomplished producer (Cemetery of Splendour, Zama) who worked with Ross on Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)—and shot by Jomo Fray (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt) and edited by Nicholas Monsour (Nope). The film stars Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson as Elwood and Turner, two kids who draw strength from their friendship as they struggle to survive the horrors of the Nickel Academy in the 1960s. The NYFF’s sixty-second edition will run from September 27 through October 14.
Toronto (September 5 through 15) has lined up a total of sixty-three Galas and Special Presentations, including the world premiere of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. In Secrets & Lies, the winner of Palme d’Or in 1996, Marianne Jean-Baptiste gave what Ashley Clark calls a “deeply charismatic performance” as an adoptee in search of her birth mother, and she became the first Black British actor to be nominated for an Oscar. We don’t know yet who Jean-Baptiste will play in Hard Truths, but Leigh’s first film set in the here and now since Another Year (2010) has been described as “a tough but compassionate and intimate study of family life.”
Joslyn Barnes is a producer and cowriter not only of Nickel Boys but also of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest. It’s an adaptation of Jim Crace’s 2013 novel, whose setting, as Nicholas Clee described it in the Observer, is “vivid but not specific. It is simply The Village, a place of fifty-eight inhabitants, many of them related. The nearest market town is ‘two days by post-horse, three days by chariot.’ Plague is still a threat. This is no arcadia: the villagers struggle to live on the products of their harvest, and on their livestock, and have learned to regard nature as ‘inflexible and stern.’ Even in a good year, winter is ‘the hungry months.’”
Conclave is a Vatican thriller starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini and directed by Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front). Amy Adams stars in Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, an adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel about an artist adjusting to her new life as a stay-at-home mom. In Julie Delpy’s comedy Meet the Barbarians, a small village in Brittany is all set to welcome a family of refugees from Ukraine—and they’re thrown off guard when the family turns out to have come from Syria instead.
The End, a postapocalyptic musical starring Tilda Swinton and George MacKay, is Joshua Oppenheimer’s first feature since 2014’s The Look of Silence and his first fictional film. TIFF 2024 will naturally feature several favorites from this year’s Cannes Film Festival, including the winner of the Palme d’Or, Sean Baker’s Anora, as well as Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Andrea Arnold’s Bird, and Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada.
When Carson Lund and Tyler Taormina, two founding members of the collective Omnes Films, had features premiering at Directors’ Fortnight earlier this year—Eephus and Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, respectively—Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay spoke with them about their collaborations and future projects. One of these is Alexandra Simpson’s No Sleep Till, which Taormina produced and described as “a beautiful, atmospheric film about a coastal Floridian town threatened by an impending hurricane and those who refuse to heed the mandatory evacuation orders.”
No Sleep Till is one of seven features set to premiere in competition during Venice Critics’ Week (August 28 through September 7). Another is Duong Dieu Linh’s debut feature, the horror comedy Don’t Cry Butterfly. Set in Hanoi, the film “follows a housewife who uses voodoo to try and get her cheating husband to fall back in love with her, but instead invites a mysterious presence into the house,” writes Patrick Frater for Variety. The director calls the film her “attempt to break away from the stereotypical portrayal of sad and powerless women, instead showing them full of life and humor, with a touch of magical realism and fantasies.”
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