This week, a whole group of queer film lovers will flock to screenings across Manhattan and Brooklyn as NewFest, New York’s premier LGBTQ film festival, celebrates its 35th anniversary. To celebrate surviving three and a half decades, the annual festival has assembled an extensive list of titles that includes some of the season’s biggest awards contenders.
The lineup, booked with Netflix biopic “Rustin” on opening night and Searchlight Pictures’ “We’re All Strangers” on its final stretch, continues the expanding trend of the nonprofit group behind the festival, which runs the festival. From Thursday to October 24.
“Over the years, studios and distributors have started to look at us differently and see that not only do we have the reach and audience, but that the special energy that is created at the NewFest show is a really great launching pad. for the film,” said David Hatkoff, executive director of NewFest, in a joint interview with Nick McCarthy, director of programming, ahead of Thursday’s premiere festivities.
Some of the year’s flagship offerings, including Emma Fidell’s Queen of New York, which blends drag and New York City politics, and Daniel Peddle’s retrospective documentary Beyond Aggression: 25 Years Later, are literally launching with world premieres. . But many of the anniversary edition’s biggest titles are using the festival as a jumping off point into awards season after splashy debuts earlier in the year.
The final film, Andrew Haigh’s We Are All Strangers, a ghostly love story about parental loss starring Paul Mescal (After the Sun) and Andrew Scott (Fleabag), premiered at this year’s Telluride Film Festival . But Hay, whose film Weekend was a narrative centerpiece at NewFest in 2011, is sure to receive a unique reception from queer audiences known for being big fans of Mescal and Scott.
Orlando: My Political Biography, the stunning debut of academic Paul B. Preciado, took the Berlin International Film Festival by storm when it premiered there in February. While the experimental documentary has already received impressive accolades such as “the first true trans masterpiece,” it’s still going strong, moving from festival darling to awards season hopeful.
May December, a new feature film from American director Todd Haynes starring longtime muses Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, opened the New York Film Festival in late September. But Haynes’ film about an actor (Portman) who develops an unhealthy obsession with the mysterious woman (Moore) she plays in a tabloid biopic exemplifies the best of what NewFest has to offer. And at this point, Haynes, who has become a beloved fixture at the queer festival since he screened his second feature, 1991’s Poison, in its third edition, will be honored with this year’s Queer Visionary Award.
And, of course, there’s the highly anticipated George C. Wolfe biopic starring Colman Domingo as gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. The film premiered in Telluride and then went to the Toronto International Film Festival and the NewFest premiere.
“Then, Now and Forever”
McCarthy described the spirit of this year’s festival as “then, now and forever” of queer cinema. As part of that, the lineup includes what he calls a “monumentally gorgeous” restoration of Isaac Julien’s 1991 Young Soul Rebels, as well as the programming team’s favorite films from the more than 1,000 submissions it received in the lead-up to the anniversary release.
“At the same time, we’re celebrating queer icons that maybe haven’t even gotten their due in the more mainstream space,” McCarthy said of the titles that represent the “timeless” part of the lineup, including “Rustin.”
The buzzy Rustin biopic, timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, was Wolfe’s first film to screen at the festival. And Wolfe, the Tony Award-winning playwright and director who directed the Broadway premiere of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, is in good company. A number of the festival’s most sought-after screenings are courtesy of NewFest’s acclaimed first-time directors.
NewFest newcomers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, the husband and wife behind 2018’s Oscar-winning year. The documentary Free Solo became the highlight of the year in the US Nyad. Their narrative debut about swimmer Diana Nyad’s 110-mile swim from Cuba to Florida, starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster., is almost guaranteed to get a few looks from Academy voters (whenever that time, depending on the end of the stalled SAG-AFTRA strike, actually comes).
The directorial duo will be joined at center stage by Hirokazu Koreeda, the acclaimed director behind the 2018 film Shoplifters. Although Kore-eda’s new film, Monster, is not in contention for the Japanese Oscar, it has been a major success at the global box office. The multi-perspective thriller about an incident at a Japanese elementary school, which Kore-eda produced in consultation with an LGBTQ children’s organization, has been a hit with critics since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
William Oldroyd, director of the 2016 film Lady Macbeth that launched Florence Pugh’s career, will also make his first appearance at NewFest. Oldroyd’s Eileen, based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s acclaimed first novel and starring Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie as juvenile detention workers whose destinies become intertwined under complicated circumstances, is perhaps the most anticipated sapphic film of the year, which has largely been underwhelming. lesbians.
Taken together, the year’s compelling films, many from non-LGBTQ filmmakers, represent the NewFest team’s evolving approach to film programming. It covers a wide range of experiences, uses more than just the directors’ personalities as a standard for weird behavior, and goes beyond the tastes of the moment.
“When we look at films, it goes beyond the trend. Which film do we consider an authentic portrait? What film do we feel puts forward, speaks to the audience – whether it’s affirmation or trying to put someone else in their place?” McCarthy said.
Under the leadership of McCarthy, who has been with the nonprofit since 2016, and Hatkoff, who took the helm in 2019, NewFest is thriving. And their approach to programming brought this year’s festival unprecedented media attention.
Hatkoff attributes the increased attention—and participation from some of the industry’s biggest players, including Netflix, Neon, MUBI and Searchlight—to not only the annual festival’s ever-growing profile, but also the nonprofit group’s “really robust year-round programming.” which includes monthly shows and flagship programs such as NewFest Pride. But he and McCarthy primarily credit the unique style of moviegoing for the growing number of people attending NewFest screenings.
“People believe that when they walk through these doors they will see a wonderful movie and there will be a magical energy in the room,” McCarthy said.
Despite NewFest’s relatively smaller size, it has managed to buck recent budget trends affecting other film institutions.
“We are bigger than ever. We are more financially stable than ever. Our audience is bigger than ever,” Hatkoff said. “In a non-profit space—in a festival space, in a queer service space—it’s unusual to be on solid ground.”
Being on solid financial footing these days is no small feat for an organization of NewFest’s type. To begin with, film festivals are having a notoriously difficult time turning a profit. Just last month, NewFest’s Los Angeles counterpart, Outfest, made headlines by firing employees who had just announced they were forming a union, claiming the move was due to “financial difficulties.” And this summer, the Big Five Berlin International Film Festival announced it would cut its lineup by nearly a third in 2024.
It’s also been a tough few years for cinemas and cultural venues that host festival screenings. Although “Barbenheimer” — the simultaneous release of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” — filled theaters over the summer, many called the box office surge a fleeting phenomenon. There is also speculation that the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild double strikes this year will lead to a content shortage and difficulty attracting audiences next year.
But while not everyone sees the future of cinema as limitless, the NewFest team’s focus on the “forever” of queer cinema is more than wishful thinking.