Barry Jenkins

Barry Jenkins was born in 1979 in the troubled neighborhood of Liberty City in Miami, where the action that has definitely put him on the map for movie lovers, Moonlight, takes place. Although the difficulties of his childhood and youth should not have reached the extremes that the protagonist of that film has to live through, they were not easy years. He had three brothers older than him, the apartment they shared was tiny, and his father died when he was 12 years old; although it is obligatory to point out that he had already left home before, arguing among other things that Barry was not really his son. An activity that allowed him to forget the problems at home consisted of playing with the football team of his high school, although it is not known that he was a figure.

He liked the movies, but he couldn’t afford to go to the best-known schools in the sector, in California. However, he got a scholarship and enrolled to train as a teacher at Florida State University, and there he attended a film course that was taught in Tallahassee. Among his classmates was Wes Ball , who years later directed The Maze Runner . His preparation as a director led him to film a couple of shorts in 2003 –they were not trifles, his debut, My Josephine spoke of a real case, a laundry run by Arabs that washed American flags for free after the 9/11 attacks–, which led to the audacity to write and direct his first feature film in 2008, an independent film titledMedicine for Melancholy , which followed the adventures of a couple for 24 hours in a city of San Francisco that is losing the vigor and vitality of yesteryear, a fact that is watched with nostalgia. It was a small film, shot with sensitivity, and it performed reasonably well on the festival circuit, although there was nothing to suggest that its second feature would give rise to almost unanimous praise. In fact, it would be almost eight years before he was able to shoot Moonlight .

In the interim, he worked on several projects that did not see the green light. It seems that for Focus Features she wrote a book about Stevie Wonder and time travel, which sounds quite bizarre, as well as an adaptation of a James Baldwin novel, “If Beale Street Could Talk”. She was also at Harpo Films, Oprah Winfrey ‘s production company .

There was a living and an income to be made, so he and a partner set up a small advertising company, appropriately called Strike Anywhere. He, too, continued to make shorts, and was even hired to write scripts for the enigmatic sci-fi series The Leftovers , though he never received a credit, and would admit that wasn’t his thing. He was influenced by more filmmakers like Hong Kong’s Wong Kar Wai , about whom he even wrote an essay, or his admired Hou Hsiao-hsien , director from Taiwan. And he even moderated debates by filmmakers he dreamed of one day emulating.

And in 2013, at the Telluride Festival, he led a discussion with none other than Steve McQueen and Brad Pitt , when they presented the screening of the later Oscar -winning 12 Years a Slave . He could not imagine that three years later he would be the one to present the world premiere of Moonlight in the same setting. Pitt, through Plan B, would be one of those who believed in Jenkins. He was fulfilling the most unlikely American dream imaginable.

Given the repercussion achieved by Moonlight , Golden Globe for Best Drama, and eight Oscar nominations, one may lose the perspective that it is a film that, despite its good billing, is shot with little means, and using bobbin lace. The best-known actors in the cast are Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris , the latter then promoting the James Bond film Spectre , who managed the 3 days of filming that her character required as best she could. Another curious anecdote is that when Ali’s character is teaching the protagonist to swim as a child, this is real as is, there was no need to pretend too much, little Alex R. Hibbert could barely stay afloat in the water.

The origin of the film was a never-produced stage text, “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue”, written by Tarell Alvin McCraney , and with which Barry Jenkins easily identified, due to the marginalized environment in which the admission process takes place. In Chiron’s adult life, described at three different ages, it was not very different from the one lived by the director himself, with broken families, drug addiction, drug trafficking and violence.He very accurately described it as “a visceral collection of memories”, “a fever dream.” Interestingly, McCraney and Jenkins had attended the same school, although they had never met and had never met before collaborating on this project.

The film stands out for its humanity, it is not a militant film, and the fragility of the protagonist is painted very well, and the difficulty in finding help, he has no father, and his mother is addicted to crack; He doesn’t have enough confidence with his friends, especially when they harass him for a sensitivity thanks to which they label him a “faggot”, and the luck of father figures that appear in his life are not enough.

On the heels of an achievement so hard to argue with comes one of those defining moments in Jenkins’ life, now what? Let’s hope that the pressure of recognition does not prevent him from getting it right and continuing to tell good stories.