Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’ Announced for Spotlight Gala at 62nd New York Film Festival

Film at Lincoln Center announces Luca Guadagnino’s Queer as the Spotlight Gala of the 62nd New York Film Festival, making its U.S. Premiere at Alice Tully Hall on October 6. 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.

“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.”

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. 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.

The film features supporting turns from Lesley Manville and Jason Schwartzman, and includes many in Guadagnino’s stable of collaborators, including Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and music 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. “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.”

Queer is a Fremantle film produced by The Apartment, a Fremantle company, and Frenesy film company; produced by Fremantle North America in collaboration with Cinecittà Spa and Frame by Frame. 

Queer is Guadagnino’s fourth film to hit NYFF after 2009’s I Am Love was selected for the 39th New Directors/New Films section, with 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, which won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Bones and All (NYFF60), winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The director’s most recent film Challengers, which had been set to open Venice last year but moved to spring due to the ongoing actor’s strike in 2023, was a critical and box office hit, starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist.

The 62nd New York Film Festival takes place September 27-October 14 and features RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, Steve McQueen’s Blitz, Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner Anora and more.

NYFF62 single tickets for the general public go on sale September 17 at noon ET, with pre-sale access for FLC Members.