They closed down Lincoln Center and put up a parking lot.
The New York Film Festival is the latest to announce that it will screen movies a la drive-in. Film at Lincoln Center announced today that the 58th iteration of its annual festival will open with not one but three Steve McQueen premieres and will take place, in part, at the Queens and Brooklyn drive-ins that were set up by Rooftop Films earlier this summer.
This year’s fest will consist of “outdoor and virtual screenings with indoor screenings as possible and directed by state and health officials,” according to a press release. It will join drive-in programming put on by the producers of the Rooftop Films Summer Series, the Greenpoint Film Festival, the Hamptons International Film Festival, the Montclair Film Festival, and the Tribeca Film Festival.
The NYFF will open Sept. 25 with the world premiere of Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock– the “fictional story of young love and music at a blues party in the early 1980s,” per Film at Lincoln Center– and will feature the world premiere of two of the four other films from the 12 Years a Slave director’s Small Axe anthology: Mangrove and Red, White and Blue. “Set from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, the films each tell a different story involving London’s West Indian community, whose lives have been shaped by their own force of will despite rampant racism and discrimination,” Film at Lincoln Center writes.
More programming and ticketing details will be unveiled in the next weeks.
At least some of the films will be screened at the drive-in that Rooftop Films set up last month at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, as well as its forthcoming drive-in at the New York Hall of Science in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, in Queens. Tickets for Rooftop Films’ Queens Drive-In– including screenings of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Muppet Movie, and The Last Out, a documentary about Cuban baseball players migrating to the Major League– went on sale last week.
Though phase four of New York City’s reopening allowed low-risk entertainment venues such as zoos and botanical gardens to reopen, it’s uncertain when movie theaters and performance venues such as Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall and Walter Reade Theater, where the festival is usually based, will be allowed to return.