#Moonlight movie movie
#Moonlight movie series

I was like, “This is kind of strange.” But the audience still felt it, which meant that it translated. The first screening at the Telluride Film Festival couldn’t have been a world farther removed from “Moonlight.” This was like the 55-year-old North Face summer vacationer. Once I saw the impact in person, something shifted.

#Moonlight movie movie

The movie is a culmination of my experiences and Tarell’s. It wasn’t clear to me how meaningful a character like Chiron would be. < span data-mce-type=”bookmark” style=”display: inline-block width: 0px overflow: hidden line-height: 0 ” class=”mce_SELRES_start”> < /span> The following excerpts from that conversation have been condensed and edited. But when he received the news that “Moonlight” had topped IndieWire’s list, he squeezed in the opportunity to consider just how much the movie changed his life, and the industry as a whole. Needless to say, Jenkins is too busy to spend much time contemplating the past.

#Moonlight movie series

He’s currently wrapping pre-production on his long-awaited Amazon series adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winner “The Underground Railroad,” and a biopic about choreographer Alvin Ailey is around the corner. In the time since then, his adaptation of James Baldwin’s “If Beale Street Could Talk” was another critical and commercial success that landed Jenkins another Oscar nomination. Three years later, he’s still sorting through the experience. Oscars 2023: Best International Feature Film PredictionsĬhristopher Nolan's Best Shots: 37 Images That Define the Director's Career 'Aftersun' Trailer: Paul Mescal Will Break Your Heartĭ23 Expo: Barry Jenkins Reveals He 'Saw Myself' in Mufasa After 'Moonlight' Oscar Win Nobody saw it coming, not even Jenkins himself. Yet even the abrupt live broadcast moment when it turned out that “Moonlight” had beaten “La La Land” after the latter movie was handed the trophy spoke to the unexpected jolt that Jenkins’ movie sent throughout the film industry.

Unusual for a $1.5 million drama of any sort, “Moonlight” grossed more than $65 million worldwide, and won the Best Picture Oscar in a shocking last-minute turn of events that entered pop culture itself. Jenkins’ adaptation of playwright Tarell Alvin McCarney’s “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” taps into the solitary experiences of Chiron, as he struggles with his sexuality and troubled family dynamics across key moments in his life, but the movie transformed that journey into a poetic experience with universal resonance. It took nearly 10 years for Jenkins’ followup to come together, but “Moonlight” became the ultimate catalyst for broader discussions about representations of the black experience in popular culture.īut the conversation wasn’t relegated to that sphere alone.

That rapid ascension made up for a lot of lost time: Anyone who caught Jenkins’ insightful 2008 debut “Medicine for Melancholy,” an absorbing two-hander about gentrification and the modern African American experience, saw the potential for a singular new voice in current cinema.

When “ Moonlight” - which IndieWire just crowned as the best film of this decade - went from breakout festival success to cultural phenomenon in 2016, Barry Jenkins catapulted to major filmmaker and when one of the most revered black storytellers to emerge this century.