This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross and Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk director Barry Jenkins.

The Opening Night selection of NYFF62, Nickel Boys is now playing in select theaters, courtesy of Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios.

Director RaMell Ross has crafted something of a new American masterpiece with the NYFF62 Opening Night selection Nickel Boys. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about two Black teens at a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida (inspired by the real-life Dozier School for Boys), Nickel Boys brings Ross’s extraordinary felicity and radical sense of perspective as a photographer of Black life in the South to a historical fiction that is as much about the trauma of racism in the U.S. as about the politics of subjectivity and spectatorship. We were thrilled to welcome RaMell Ross for a wide-ranging conversation with Barry Jenkins—another masterful filmmaker known for his visionary and lyrical approach to depicting Blackness and the American South onscreen, including in his own Colson Whitehead adaptation, 2020’s The Underground Railroad series.

NYFF Free Talks are presented by HBO.

This Free Talk between RaMell Ross and Barry Jenkins was sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter.