The Hamptons International Film Festival has announced the addition of three narrative features to its lineup, including “the uncut gem of this year’s Cannes competition.”
That is how Variety’s Peter Debruge described “Anora,” winner of that festival’s Palme D’Or. Directed by Sean Baker (“The Florida Project”), the film is a wild comedy about Anora, a young woman from Brighton Beach who works at a Manhattan lap-dancing bar.
There she meets and impulsively marries Ivan, the son of a Russian oligarch. However, her Cinderella story hits a bumpy, if comedic, road when Ivan’s parents set out for New York to get the marriage annulled.
Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Nickel Boys” has been adapted for the screen by RaMell Ross, an Oscar nominee for “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” a 2018 documentary about a black community in Alabama.
Inspired by real-life events, “Nickel Boys” illuminates the friendship between two teenagers who become wards of a juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow-era Florida. Lovia Gyarkye of The Hollywood Reporter called the film “an arresting narrative debut” for Mr. Ross, who, “as a filmmaker, stretches what it means to represent Black people.”
“September 5” dramatizes a horrific true event, the taking of Israeli hostages at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Directed by Tim Fehlbaum, the film follows the ABC sports broadcasting team as it pivots from sports reporting to on-air coverage of the crisis.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Jordan Mintzer wrote, “Even if you know how the Munich attacks tragically concluded, the film remains suspenseful to the end, focusing on characters trapped between their desire to accomplish their jobs and their awareness of what’s exactly at stake.”
Individual tickets for all films are now on sale from the festival’s website. The festival will run from Friday, Oct. 4 through Oct. 14.
