MUMBAI: Ang Lee‘s big-screen adaptation of the bestselling Yann Martel novel Life of Pi 3D will open the New York film festival next month. The screening on 28 September, which raises the curtain on the festival‘s 50th edition, should help position Life of Pi for an awards season run.

Martel‘s 2002 Man Booker prize-winning novel chronicles the travails of a shipwrecked teenage boy stuck on a life raft with only a female orangutan, an injured zebra, a hungry hyena and a brooding Bengal tiger for company. Suraj Sharma, a 17-year-old student from Delhi, takes the lead role in the film adaptation after beating more than 3,000 other challengers to the role last year.

Lee, who opened the festival in 1997, with The Ice Storm, joins Robert Altman, Pedro Almodóvar and François Truffaut in the rank of filmmakers who opened the festival at least twice.

"Life of Pi is a perfect combination of technological innovation and a strong artistic vision. Ang Lee has managed to make a deeply moving, engrossing work that will delight audiences as much as it will astonish them. We‘re enormously proud to have this film for our opening night for the 50th NYFF," said Richard Pe?a of The Film Society of Lincoln Center, the festival‘s organising body.

This year‘s New York film festival will run from 28 September to 14 October.