Buzzy ‘May December' to open 61st New York Film Festival

The 61st New York Film Festival will kick off with Todd Haynes' “May December,” a juicy drama starring Natalie Portman as an actor preparing for a film about a years-ago tabloid scandal.

Film at Lincoln Center, which puts on the New York Film Festival, announced Tuesday that “May December” — one of the standouts at this year's Cannes Film Festival — will be the opening night film at this year's edition. The gala will take place Sept. 29 at Alice Tully Hall. In it, Portman plays a well-known TV star who, to research a role, spends time with Gracie and her much-younger husband, Joe . They're a seemingly happy suburban family whose initial affair 20 years earlier, when Joe was 13, was a national story. Their backstory is loosely based on the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, a Washington State schoolteacher convicted of raping her sixth-grade student, Vili Fualaau. They later married.

“'May December' is a tour de force of writing, acting, and directing: a film built on moment-to-moment surprise, as thought-provoking as it is purely pleasurable,” said Dennis Lim, the festival's artistic director, in a statement. “It cements Todd Haynes’s place as one of American cinema’s most brilliant mischief-makers and as an all-time great director of actors."Following its Cannes premiere, Netflix acquired “May December” and will release it in theaters Nov.

“It is a festival that plays a role in my work and life like no other in the world, since it enshrines the cultural life of this city, which is both my creative home as a filmmaker and, as ever, the eternal site of artistic possibility," Haynes said in a statement.

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