Nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay last year, Nickel Boys is the most radical big budget movie this side of Megalopolis. Making his dramatic feature debut, director RaMell Ross (Hale County, This Morning, This Evening) opts for a subjective camera throughout, although when Elwood arrives at the Nickel Academy reform school and meets his fellow inmate and future ally Turner, Ross does something unprecedented, allowing the same scene to play out twice from different points of view. Thereafter we see the narrative unfold from alternate perspectives, as Turner and as Elwood experience the ritual racist humiliations of the school, and, eventually, plot their escape.
Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer winning novel, itself inspired by a notorious Florida reform school, the Dozier School for Boys, the movie is unflinching in its condemnation of institutional racism, and its compassion for the traumatized survivors.
This screening is in our latest Film Studies series on literary Adaptations, led by Patricia Gruben, who will give a 15-minute introduction.
Patricia Gruben is a filmmaker and former associate professor of film at Simon Fraser University, as well as founder and long-time director of Praxis Centre for Screenwriters (now the Screenwriters Lab at the Whistler Film Festival.) Her films have been screened at TIFF, VIFF, Sundance and the New York Film Festival, and her writing on film has appeared in international academic and popular journals. Her latest film was Heart of Gold.
Nickel Boys is a life, made up of pieces; some of them lovely, some devastating. It’s a mesmerizing, uniquely told story — of memory, of injustice, of friendship, of survival.
Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times
The approach takes some getting used to, but the effect is astonishing. It calls on us to empathize in a radical new way with these two young men, their fleeting hopes and their crushing sense of entrapment.
Justin Chang, NPR
As major and memorable an achievement as any American film this decade.
David Ehrlich, Indiewire
RaMell Ross
Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, Jimmie Fails,Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
USA
2024
English
2 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay (2025)
Book Tickets
Saturday March 21
Indigenous & Community Access
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Credits
Screenwriter
RaMell Ross , Joslyn Barnes
Cinematography
Jomo Fray
Editor
Nicholas Monsour
Original Music
Scott Alario, Alex Somers
Production Design
Nora Mendis
Art Director
Elizabeth Herberg
Also in This Series
Film Studies: Adaptations looks at five acclaimed literary texts and the very different challenges they posed to filmmakers.
The English Patient
In the first of a new Film Studies series exploring literary adaptations, director Anthony Minghella tackles Michael Ondatje's challenging, poetic WWII novel about an enigmatic, badly burnt patient with a tragic past. Introduced by Patricia Gruben.
Nomadland
Hamnet director Chloe Zhao picked up one of three Academy Awards (along with Best Picture and Best Actress) in 2021 for this unconventional, compassionate adaptation of Jessica Bruder's nonfiction book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century.
The American Friend
Wim Wenders' take on Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game is the real deal, an authentic mittel-European neo-noir, with Dennis Hopper as the original American psycho, Tom Ripley. This Film Studies screening is introduced by Patricia Gruben.
