Inside Cinema: Barry Jenkins

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Inside Cinema: Black History Month: Barry Jenkins

Barry Jenkins

Black History Month

BBC Arts - Inside Cinema, Black History Month, Barry Jenkins

Documentary from Grace Barber-Plentie on trailblazing Moonlight director Barry Jenkins.

Documentary from Grace Barber-Plentie on trailblazing film director Barry Jenkins, whose Best Picture winner Moonlight made Oscar night history in 2017.

An exploration of the work of Barry Jenkins, a trailblazing film director whose Best Picture winner Moonlight made Oscar night history in 2017, beating La La Land to Best Picture following a dramatic and unprecedented envelope mix-up.

Grace Barber-Plentie, a writer and programmer specialising in depictions of people of colour, particularly black women, in pop culture. explores Jenkins’s body of work, from his charming low-fi breakout, romantic drama Medicine for Melancholy, to his current status as only the second black director to make a film which has won the Oscar for Best Picture.

His first film, Medicine for Melancholy, marked the first time Jenkins worked with cinematographer James Laxton, a professional relationship that would see the director and his favourite director of photograph work together on every subsequent project. Medicine for Melancholy was influenced by the work of French director Claire Denis, in particular her film Vendredi soir, with Jenkins positioning his work as part of an outward-looking, cosmopolitan cinematic tradition with its roots in European cinema.

His next film, Moonlight, was a higher profile project, with a cast of stars including Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris and popstar Janelle Monae. Moonlight also wears its cinematic influences on its sleeve, including the work of director Wong Kar-wai, again showing that his work is culturally open, speaking a global language of references. Jenkins was also influenced by directors such as Kahlil Joseph and his heightened, hyper-real depiction of black lives in music videos like Until the Quiet Comes.

Moonlight manages to be two things - specific and universal. Jenkins, a black film-maker, makes a film for and about black people, but like any good coming-of-age story, Moonlight captured its audience's hearts because it was universal, with people from all walks of life able to relate to it.

Jenkins’s return to cinema after Moonlight’s dramatic Oscar win was 2018’s If Beale Street Could Talk, looking at the prison industrial complex through the words of pioneering African-American author James Baldwin, the first film adaptation of Baldwin’s fiction. The film follows star-crossed young lovers Tish and Fonny in 1960s New York, who are separated after Fonny is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. 

Inside Cinema: Barry Jenkins shows how this director takes heavy, thought-provoking subject matter and weaves it into stories all about love, drawing together a plethora of international influences to tell uniquely black American stories.

Inside Cinema: Black History Month

BBC Arts

A deep dive into the work of four 21st-century revolutionary black film directors.

To celebrate Black History Month, Inside Cinema offers a four-part deep dive into the work of four revolutionary black film directors driving change in the 21st century.

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