Catch up TV

Black History Month: 3. Barry Jenkins

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.\n\nGrace 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.\n\nHis 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.\n\nHis 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.\n\nMoonlight 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.\n\nJenkins’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. \n\nInside 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.

Source: BBC 4