Luca Guadagnino’s new movie “Queer” does not have an American distributor just yet, but it does have a U.S. premiere. The drug-fueled gay romance, starring Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey and based on a William S. Burroughs novella, will screen at the 2024 New York Film Festival following a world premiere in the Venice competition . NYFF announced today that “Queer” will screen as its Spotlight Gala on October 6. And mathing the festival math, a U.S. premiere means “Queer” won’t show up at Telluride but should expect to be added to the Toronto International Film Festival lineup for its North American premiere any day now.
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The NYFF announcement provides us with a more detailed synopsis for the film: “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.”
The synopsis continues: “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.”
Along with “Call Me by Your Name,” Guadagnino also brought the young adult cannibal romance “Bones and All” to NYFF. His sexually amped-up tennis ménage à trois “Challengers” opened in wide release earlier this year without festival play, though it was previously slated to debut at the 2023 Venice Film Festival before pulling out due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. “Challengers” scribe Justin Kuritzkes is the screenwriter for “Queer.”
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“I am so privileged and elated to present a movie of mine for the third time at NYFF, ‘Queer’ in particular,” said Guadagnino. “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.”
“Luca Guadagnino is one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile filmmakers, and one of its biggest risk-takers,” said Dennis Lim, Artistic Director, New York Film Festival. “’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.”
See more from the 2024 New York Film Festival main slate here .
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