New York Film Festival Sets Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’ As Spotlight Gala

The New York Film Festival said Luca Guadagnino’s Queer will be the Spotlight Gala of the 62nd New York Film Festival, making its U.S. premiere.

The adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s novel, scripted by Justin Kuritzkes, stars Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville, Michael Borremans, Andra Ursuta, and David Lowery. Written in the early 1950s but not published until 1985, Queer has come to be considered a canonical work in the career of the Beat Generation author and a cornerstone of transgressive gay literature.

“Luca Guadagnino is one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile filmmakers, and one of its biggest risk-takers,” said NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. “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.”

Craig plays Burroughs’s alter ego William Lee, a heroin user in a disconnected group of gay American expatriates in Mexico City in the late 1940s. When enigmatic, preppy ex-military kid Eugene Allerton (Starkey) catches Lee’s eye, he tumbles into a love affair and an odyssey that will take the pair to the Ecuadorian jungle in pursuit of the ultimate high.

The film, which will premiere in Venice, is a showcase for many in Guadagnino’s stable of collaborators, including Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

“I am so privileged and elated to present a movie of mine for the third time at NYFF, Queer in particular,” said Guadagnino ((I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, Call Me by Your Name, Suspiria, Bones And All, and Challengers). “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.”

See NYFF full slate here.

The festival runs September 27–October 14. The Spotlight section, expands the vision of the Main Slate, showcasing a selection of the season’s most anticipated and significant films.