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.
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 Eugen.