Following the previously announced news that the New York Film Festival will open with Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, festival execs announce its closing night feature.
EW reports that the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced Wednesday that Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate, a biopic about the final days of famed artist Vincent van Gogh will conclude the festival’s 56th edition
Starring as the artsy lead is Willem Dafoe alongside Oscar Isaac, Rupert Friend, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner and Mads Mikkelsen in supporting roles.
“At Eternity’s Gate is such a surprising film, for all kinds of reasons. Julian Schnabel makes use of the most up-to-date information about Vincent van Gogh, altering our accepted ideas of how he lived and died; he grounds the film in the very action of painting, the intense contact between an artist and the world of forms and textures colored by light; and he gives us Willem Dafoe’s performance as Vincent — acting this pure is endlessly surprising,” New York Film Festival director and selection committee chair Kent Jones said in announcing the film’s selection.
“I would like to say thank you to Kent Jones and the NYFF selection committee on behalf of Willem Dafoe, who is Vincent van Gogh in the film, and the cast and crew, who I have been so privileged to work with, for choosing At Eternity’s Gate for Closing Night,” Schnabel said in a press statement. “It is a profound honor to be included with the other films and to be part of the history of Closing Night films that came before us. Looking forward to sitting in the audience with everybody.”
The annual festival will take place on October 12 at Manhattan’s Alice Tully Hall.
