The Lost City of Z, the latest from writer/director James Gray (The Immigrant, Two Lovers), has been announced as the closing film for the 54th New York film festival. The film, starring Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller and Robert Pattinson, will be making its world premiere at the event.
Based on the journalist David Grann’s non-fiction book of the same name, The Lost City of Z centers on Lt Col Percy Fawcett (Hunnam), a British military man who embarks on a decades-long search for a lost city deep in the Amazon during the 1920s.
Fawcett is said to have been one of George Lucas’s inspirations for Indiana Jones and was also a friend of the authors H Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle; the latter’s The Lost World was inspired by the explorer.
The mystery of what happened to the adventurer remains one of the 20th century’s enduring puzzles: 13 expeditions (one as recently as 1996) have been sent to uncover Fawcett’s fate.
In a statement, the festival said the film “represents a form of epic storytelling that has all but vanished from the landscape of modern cinema, and a rare level of artistry”.
Gray’s previous film, The Immigrant, starring Marion Cotillard, played at the 51st edition of the festival, in 2013, following its world premiere at Cannes.
Bratt Pitt was first attached to play Fawcett in Gray’s film. He was then replaced by Benedict Cumberbatch, before the role eventually landed with Hunnam, who plays the titular character in Guy Ritchie’s upcoming blockbuster King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.
As previously announced, The 13th, Ava DuVernay’s documentary on race and prison, will open the event, while 20th Century Women, the new film from Beginners writer-director Mike Mills, will have its world premiere as the centerpiece screening.
