Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women, a comedy about three women who come together in a bohemian household in Santa Barbara in the late 1970s, has been selected to screen as the Centerpiece film of the 54th New York Film Festival.
The pic, which will have its world premiere Oct. 8 at the fest, stars Annette Bening as a single mom raising a teenage son (Lucas Jade Zumann), Greta Gerwig as a punk artist, Elle Fanning as the son’s rebellious friend and Billy Crudup as an itinerant carpenter.
Mills, whose last film was 2010’s Beginners, wrote and directed Women, which was produced by Megan Ellison of Annapurna Pictures, Anne Carey of Archer Gray and Youree Henley. It will be released in December by A24.
“I was taken aback by 20th Century Women. It’s made with an extraordinarily unusual level of craft and attention to detail, human and visual, which is now all but extinct,” Kent Jones, New York Film Festival director and chair of the selection committee, said Wednesday in a statement. “As someone who actually lived through 1979 in middle-class America, I will testify to the fact that Mike Mills and his remarkable cast approach the level of the uncanny. I felt like I was back there, with all the shared behaviors and worries, the divisions, the look and feel and smell of the world as it was.”
The festival, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and set to run Sept. 30-Oct. 16, will open with the world premiere of Ava DuVernay’s documentary The 13th.
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