Love in the Time of Uncertainty

IF WE CONTINUE to progress toward a future where marginalized people are enabled to tell their own stories, particularly in media and entertainment, then Barry Jenkins is a storyteller who’s been ahead of the curve.

In the summer of 2013, five years after the release of his breakout indie Medicine for Melancholy, the writer-director was simultaneously developing two scripts. The first was Moonlight, Jenkins’s collaborative adaptation of Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, about a gay black man hustling through three torrid stages of life. The second was If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins’s take on James Baldwin’s 1974 novel about a young black woman in 1970s Harlem who’s pregnant with the child of her wrongfully imprisoned lover.