DETROIT — More than two years after it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, director Qasim Basir's Detroit-filmed "To Live and Die and Live" is finally headed to theaters.

Ahead of its May 16 arrival at AMC Theatres locations in 25 cities nationwide, including Metro Detroit, the film will hold a local premiere event at Michigan Central Station on May 6, Basir told The Detroit News on Thursday.

The black-tie event will feature area tastemakers as well as cast and crew of the movie, a Detroit-set drama about a filmmaker (played by Amin Joseph of TV's "Snowfall") who returns home to Detroit after the death of his stepfather. The event will be open to the public; ticketing details are still being worked out, Basir said.

Deadline reported Thursday that "To Live and Die and Live" secured a theatrical distribution deal with AuthentiQ Films & CinemaStreet Pictures. The film is due for a home release later this year through Samuel Goldwyn Films, which previously picked up Basir's film "A Boy. A Girl. A Dream," which played at Sundance in 2018.

"To Live and Die and Live" was shot in and around downtown in summer 2021, just as the city was beginning to rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic, and it features Detroit in a light far different from how it is typically depicted on screen.

"I wanted to shoot Detroit beautiful because no one does that," Basir told The Detroit News in 2023, just as the movie was headed to Sundance. "It's always the blight, the decay, the destruction. So it was like, alright, if I have a chance to photograph this city in a way that no one's done it, that would be kind of cool, as a backdrop to this story."

Basir, who shot the film himself in addition to writing, directing and producing it, based it on his own journey home after the loss of his stepfather.

Basir said he's been working to find distribution for the film since its 2023 Sundance premiere. "It's difficult, because the business has changed drastically in the last 3-5 years with the strikes, with the pandemic, there's just a lot that's happened. But one of the areas that's suffered more than almost any other is the indie film space," he said.

While the film played Sundance and a few other festivals, "to the majority of the world, this is a brand new movie," Basir said. "No one's really seen it outside of the festival circuit."

After its Sundance premiere, the movie earned an 89% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on nine reviews.

Basir, who grew up in Ann Arbor and Detroit, shared the news of "To Live and Die and Live's" pickup on Instagram on Thursday. Underneath the Deadline article announcing the news, he wrote, "It's time!"

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