Tag: Barry Jenkins

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Indie Memphis 2023: Barry Jenkins on All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

Before he became Academy Award-Winning Director Barry Jenkins, the filmmaker brought his debut Medicine for Melancholy to Indie Memphis in 2008. He’s always kept in touch with his indie film roots, even after winning the Best Picture Oscar for 2016’s Moonlight. In 2019, he served as a judge for the Indie Memphis Black Filmmaker Residency for Screenwriting. “I enjoyed the process so much that I thought that there should be two grants, one for someone who’s not Memphian, and then also for someone local. So I matched the grant that Indie Memphis was offering.” 

The project that got Jenkins’ nod for the residency was All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt by Raven Jackson. “It was a bunch of proposals,” says Jenkins, but what caught his eye about this one was the originality of the vision. “Usually, people create a ‘lookbook,’ and that lookbook or mood board has all these images of things that they didn’t create. It’s like, I’ll take an image from this film, or an image from this fashion spread, or the image from this sort of photographer’s work. It was clear that Raven’s mood board, her pitch deck, was all her own imagery, which I thought was really cool. You could see very clearly what her aesthetic was, and she spoke about how she saw the film, how the film would feel … She just had a very clear voice, and with the material she provided it was very obvious she could back that voice up, that she could do what she said she was going to do.”

The Tennessee-born filmmaker spent two months in Memphis finishing the screenplay before shopping it to Hollywood producers. “Raven had her pick of outfits she could have gone with,” Jenkins says. “It was a very competitive situation between A24 and a couple other companies to finance the script,” he recalls. “The script came back to me, not through Indie Memphis, but through very professional channels, because people were reading it once Raven had completed the script. So, shout out to the Indie Memphis residency. It certainly was good for her! People were talking about how it was unlike anything they had ever read. And then once I read it, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is really damn cool. Let’s knock on Raven Jackson’s door again and figure out if there’s a way to help her make this film.”

Jenkins’ production company Pastel produced the film along with A24, filming the bulk of it near Jackson, Mississippi. “Some of her [Raven’s] lineage is from Mississippi, and there were a few locations that she specifically was interested in, and things that she had seen in imagery from her childhood. There were churches that she had read about that were in the Jackson area in Mississippi, and they were still there and still existed. Organically, the film sort of rooted itself in Mississippi.” 

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt premiered last January at Sundance. It comes full circle as the opening night film of Indie Memphis 2023. “I think people are kind of just in awe of how tactile the film is,” says Jenkins. “It ignites your senses, which is crazy, because you’re watching these images projected on a flat screen in a theater, and yet they feel three-dimensional. You can tell it’s that Southern light, but also in the sounds, the movie really envelopes people. There’s a very standardized way that we become accustomed to watching television and watching movies, and the films have a certain rhythm and a certain logic. Raven has created this thing with a logic that doesn’t have any fidelity to any of those things. I think when people see the film for the first time, it’s a very unique experience, is what I’ll say. There are some people who grew up in regions like this, the one depicted in the film, who do feel like they’re taken home. And then there are other people for whom this world is completely alien, and they feel like they’ve been invited to a place, immersed in someone’s very real memories of what it’s like to be a young Black woman growing up in the American South.” 

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt screens at Crosstown Theater on Tuesday, October 24, 2023 at 6:30 p.m. as the opening night film of the 26th annual Indie Memphis Film Festival. 

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The Savagery of Man: Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad

Mbedu and Aaron Pierre in The Underground Railroad

Perhaps Barry Jenkins’ biggest claim to fame is as a party to an accident. At the climax of the 2017 Academy Awards, presenters Warren Beaty and Faye Dunaway were handed the wrong envelope and mistakenly announced La La Land as the winner of Best Picture. In fact, the winner was Jenkins’ film Moonlight.

It was the right choice. La La Land is an entertaining piece of craftsmanship, but Moonlight is legitimately one of the best films of the 21st century. Jenkins has the rare combination of complete technical mastery and a deeply empathetic mind. In other words, he can not only frame a good shot, he knows how to get the best from actors, too. Both skills are included in the “director” job description, but you’d be surprised how many well-paid people lack chops in one category — or both.

Jenkins, a native of Florida, cut his teeth in the low-budget indie world, and his projects until now have been as modestly scaled as they are brilliantly executed. Even his historical drama, the 2018 adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk, which earned Regina King a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, remained focused on the story of two star-crossed lovers. With his new limited series for Amazon, The Underground Railroad, Jenkins’ vision was given the opportunity to expand to epic size. The director is more than up for the challenge.

The Underground Railroad is based on a novel by Colson Whitehead, which has been confounding genres and expectations since it was published in 2016. It’s a rare bird that won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. In Whitehead’s alternate American South of the 1850s, the Underground Railroad is not a secret network of safe houses and smuggling routes set up by Abolitionists and free Blacks to transport slaves to the free states of the North, and eventually Canada, but instead an actual railroad that runs underground. That detail, in which the metaphorical is made real, is key. This story is not about the historical reality of Antebellum America, but the psychological reality of Black experience in America.

Thuso Mbedu as Cora

Cora (Thuso Mbedu) is a slave on a plantation in Georgia. Her mother disappeared from the plantation years ago, when Cora was a child, and is assumed by local slave catcher Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) to be the rare Black person who actually escaped the clutches of the Southern racial caste system. In the harrowing opening episode, we see the price of a failed escape, as Big Anthony (Elijah Everett) is tortured to death for the amusement of his masters’ garden party. The image of the plantation owners dancing a minuet while burning a man to death might seem over-the-top if the florid cruelty of Jim Crow lynchings wasn’t so exhaustively documented.

Cora is convinced to flee with her friend Caesar (Aaron Pierre), and they plunge into a series of adventures all over the South as they flee the relentless Ridgeway. Jenkins is cinema’s foremost romantic — his stories have always revolved around the core of a beautiful love story — but the relationship between Cora and Caesar takes a back seat to the creation of spiraling tension and otherworldly images. It’s never clear where Cora’s dreams and visions end and the “real world” begin. She flashes back to memories of fear and mistreatment on the farm, and her trauma manifests in unexpected ways.

But Cora’s not the only one living in a dream world. The racial apartheid system ties everyone into cognitive knots. Cora’s first stop is a utopian community in South Carolina, where progressive white benefactors are running a research program “for the potential betterment of Negro lives.” That facade soon falls apart. Alternate North Carolina, where Black people have been completely exterminated and outlawed, operates like Nazi Germany during the Final Solution, right down to an Anne Frank figure hiding in an attic. Both racists and abolitionists believe they are doing what the Bible tells them to do. Most chilling of all is Ridgeway’s sidekick Homer (Chase Dillon), a 10-year-old Black boy who is a fearsome, emotionless slave catcher.

Jenkins is one of the most talented composers of images working today. Every few minutes, he throws out a shot that would be a career high for lesser talents. His color sense is simply unmatched. The visual fireworks are coupled with striking, subtle performances from Mbedu and Pierre — and, really, everyone on the screen. The Underground Railroad joins the ranks of Twin Peaks: The Return and Watchmen as the pinnacle of what ambitious, artful television can achieve. It’s also a warning of, as one “station agent” observes, “The savagery Man is capable of when he believe his cause to be just.”

The Underground Railroad is streaming on Amazon Prime.

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Indie Memphis and U of M Present The Debuts: Three of the Best First Films of the Last 15 Years

Tracey Higgins and Wyatt Cenac in Barry Jenkins' debut film, Medicine for Melancholy.

Film festivals are where most filmmakers get their start. Indeed, finding fresh new voices and seeing radical new visions in a too-often bland and homogeneous filmscape is a big draw for festivals like Indie Memphis. Now, the fest is teaming up with the University of Memphis to bring three first films from directors who went on to do big things. 

The Debuts screenings, May 5-6 at the Malco Summer Drive-In, are curated by University of Memphis Department of Communication and Film professor Marty Lang. The first film in the series (May 5th) is one of the most consequential first films of the 21st century. Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy screened at Indie Memphis in 2008. Set in the booming San Francisco of the Aughts, the film stars Wyatt Cenac, who went on The Daily Show fame, and Tracey Higgins, who would later appear in The Twilight Saga, as two young lovers who try to come to terms with their place in the racial and economic hierarchy of their allegedly free and egalitarian city. Jenkins went on to win Best Picture in 2016 for Moonlight; his new historical fantasy project, The Underground Railroad, drops on Amazon Prime on May 14th. The screening will be followed by a discussion led by members of the Memphis Black arts organization The Collective. 

Then, on May 6th, a double feature kicks off with the debut film by Jeff Nichols. The Little Rock, Arkansas native is the brother of Lucero’s frontman Ben Nichols. His first film was Shotgun Stories, starring Michael Shannon. The 2007 film is the story of a feud between two sets of Arkansan half-brothers who find themselves in radically different circumstances, despite their blood connection. After the screening, Nichols will speak with Lang about the making of the film, and his subsequent career, which includes the Matthew McConaughey drama Mud and Loving, the story of the Virginia couple whose relationship led to the Supreme Court legalizing interracial marriage. 

The second film on May 6th is Sun Don’t Shine by Amy Seimetz. The 2012 film stars Memphis filmmaker and NoBudge founder Kentucker Audley and Kate Lyn Sheil (who later went on to roles in House of Cards and High Maintenance) as a couple on a tense road trip along the Florida Gulf Coast. Seimetz went on to a prodigious acting career, as well as leading the TV series adaptation of Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience and directing one of 2020’s most paranoid films, She Dies Tomorrow. Lang will also interview Seimetz about beginning her career with Sun Don’t Shine. 

Tickets to the screenings are available on the Indie Memphis website.

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Academy Award Winning Director Barry Jenkins Talks with Indie Memphis Movie Club

Barry Jenkins

Nobody does onscreen romance better than Barry Jenkins. The Indie Memphis alum won Best Picture for 2016’s Moonlight (which was also the Memphis Flyer‘s #2 film of the decade), an achingly beautiful portrait of a neglected black boy growing up gay on the mean streets of Miami’s Liberty City.

Jenkins has been a friend to Memphis filmmakers, helping establish Indie Memphis’ Black FIlmmaker Fellowship for Screenwriting in 2019. Today, May 5th, he and Indie Memphis’ Artistic Director Miriam Bale will hold an online Q&A to talk about one of the Indie Memphis Movie Club’s current selections.

Jean Arthur, Charles Coburn and Joel McCrea in The More the Merrier.

The More the Merrier was filmed during the height of World War II. It’s not a war movie in the sense Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was a war movie. George Stephens’ film is a screwball comedy set against the chaos of the home front. As Washington D.C. ramps up to deal with the historic conflict, the workers called to the nation’s capitol face a historic housing shortage. Connie Milligan (Jean Arthur) is a single professional woman with a sizable apartment who decides to sublet to someone in need. Benjamin Dingle (Charles Coburn), a semi-retired developer, arrives in DC to advise a Senator on the situation, only to find himself caught up in the housing crisis himself. He sweet talks his way into Connie’s home, and strikes up a prickly friendship with his hyper-organized new roommate. When Sgt. Joe Carter shows up belatedly answering the newspaper ad (and, for reasons that are never explained, carrying an airplane propeller), Dingle takes it upon himself to sublet his sublet, and play matchmaker for the two young singles.

As a comedy of people falling in love while trying to cope in the midst of a world shattering crisis, The More the Merrier is extremely timely. It’s also one of Jenkins’ favorite movies, and it’s easy to see why. It’s an unusually humanistic story for the time, and the romantic chemistry between Jean Arthur (who was nominated for Best Actress) and Joel McCrea crackles off the screen from the moment they meet wearing bathrobes in her hallway.

You can watch The More The Merrier on the Criterion Channel, then tune in at 8 PM tonight for the talk. Indie Memphis members can get an invite to ask questions on Zoom, and the whole program will be available for free on YouTube. 

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Indie Memphis’ Black Independence Series Concludes With Daughters of the Dust and Moonlight

Mahershala Ali in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight.

Indie Memphis’ Black Independence Series saved the best for last. The month-long mini-festival concludes this week with a pair of powerhouse pictures.

The first, screening on Wednesday, October 9th at Malco Ridgeway, is the classic Daughters of the Dust. In 1991, the film won the cinematography award at Sundance Film Festival, and director Julie Dash became the first African-American woman to have her film released wide in the United States. It is a generational portrait of the women of the Gullah culture on the island of Saint Helena in South Carolina, which has preserved pre-slavery West African influences for hundreds of years.

The youngest woman, Yellow Mary (Barbara O) brings her new boyfriend to meet the family, causing a rift between her and matriarch Nana Peazant (Cora Lee Day), who is dead set on staying on the island and preserving the culture. The film is a dense, nonlinear, cinematic masterpiece that Beyonce has cited as a major visual influence on her Lemonade music video album.

Indie Memphis’ Black Independence Series Concludes With Daughters of the Dust and Moonlight

Recently, I was talking to my wife about the necessity of compiling a Best Movies of the 2010s list in December. We both agreed that Moonlight would have to be somewhere near the top. Barry Jenkins’ 2016 Best Picture winner’s list of accolades is so long it has its own separate Wikipedia page. After my first viewing, I talked about that crossfade shot that drew gasps in the theater for weeks to anyone who would listen. If you’ve seen the movie, you know which one I’m talking about.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s your chance to catch up in a unique venue—outdoors on the banks of the Mississippi at the River Garden on Riverside Drive. The show will start at 7:00 p.m., and will be proceeded at 5:30 by a DJ set from Kid Maestro. The screening and concert are free, so you have no excuses to miss one of the great cinematic masterworks of the twenty-first century.

Indie Memphis’ Black Independence Series Concludes With Daughters of the Dust and Moonlight (2)

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If Beale Street Could Talk

Kiki Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk

Let’s get this out of the way: If Beale Street Could Talk is not set in Memphis. It’s not about Beale Street or the blues, or loquacious rights-of-way. In fact, in the opening epigraph, author James Baldwin says Beale Street is in New Orleans.

James Baldwin may have been geographically challenged, but he was a stone cold literary genius. When he invoked Beale Street in the opening of his 1974 novel, one of the country’s first black-owned business districts existed to him as a lost world of African-American freedom. The name represented the realization of the kind of personal autonomy American capitalism always promises, but which was ultimately denied to people like Tish Rivers (Kiki Layne) and Fonny Hunt (Stephan James), two young, working-class kids from Harlem, who happen to be black.

Tish and Fonny are in love like only 19-year-olds can be. As soon as Fonny gets a new place — he’s got a crappy cold-water flat, but the budding sculptor is looking at a fixer-upper artist’s loft — he’s going to pop the question. But then Fonny gets in the mildest of street hassles, just a little pushing and shoving over Tish’s honor, and all the sudden he’s in the crosshairs of the prison-industrial complex. The racist cop he pisses off that fateful night soon gets an opportunity to frame him for a brutal rape that happened on the other side the city. With Fonny on trial for his life, it is not a good time for Tish to announce she’s pregnant.

Director Barry Jenkins has broken the rule that mediocre books make the best movies. He takes Baldwin’s dauntingly nonlinear literary structure and makes it smooth and easily understandable. Each jump forward and backward in time reveals a little bit more of the story in a way designed to maximize the emotional impact. The ending, when it comes, reveals characters who are forever changed, but unbroken.

Jenkins color sense is second to no one working today. I think he invented some new, tastefully early-70s hues especially for this movie. The film’s recreation of 1970s Harlem is flawless, and, knowing Jenkins, done efficiently. Jenkins loves to work in close up, or with his camera fixed on an effortlessly flawless composition. When his camera does move, it flows through space.

Every performance on the screen, from Layne’s heartbreakingly naive Tish, interrupted on the edge of lasting happiness, to Colman Doming bringing laughing gravitas to the role of her father, feels fully human. As Tish’s mother, Regina King puts on a one-woman Strasberg-ian acting clinic.

Regina King as Sharon Rivers

It all comes together in an emotionally epic scene where Tish and Fonny’s families grapple with the reality of a new baby on the way. If my description makes this film sound like a downer, it’s not. Tish’s family’s first reaction is to rejoice at the prospect of a new member. They know Tish and Fonny’s love is real. It’s different with Fonny’s family. His religious mother (Aunjanue Ellis, tightly wound) lashes out at the Rivers family, while the two grandads-to-be hatch plots to pay for it all. It’s a deeply humane and instantly recognizable scene that, if removed from the larger context, would be the best short film of the year.

But the tender pas de deux between Tish and Fonny, told intermittently between scenes of fear and despair, is the beating heart of the picture. Is there anyone who does romance better than Jenkins? The couple’s wide-eyed innocence, an emotion never available to the brutally repressed Charon Harris in Moonlight, is pure joy to behold. If, as Roger Ebert said, movies are machines to create empathy, then Jenkins is our greatest empathetic engineer.

Together, Baldwin and Jenkins celebrate the love that flourishes in the midst of tragedy and injustice. Jenkins came up from the indie underground, emerging from Miami in 2008 with Medicine for Melancholy and going on to win Best Picture for 2016’s Moonlight. He found the perfect material to adapt in If Beale Street Could Talk. Its examination of the human cost of the carceral state and indictment of institutions of justice that wink at racism as long as the conviction numbers stay high is, sadly, as relevant as ever.

If Beale Street Could Talk

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2018: The Year In Film

If there is a common theme among the best films of 2018, it’s wrenching order from chaos. From Regina Hall trying to hold both a restaurant and a marriage together to Lakeith Stanfield navigating the surreal moral minefields of late-stage capitalism, the best heroes positioned themselves as the last sane people in a world gone mad.

Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades Freed

Worst Picture: Fifty Shades Freed

In her epic deconstruction of the final installment of everyone’s least favorite BDSM erotica trilogy, Eileen Townsend called Fifty Shades Freed a “sequence of intentionally crafted visual stimuli” that “bears coincidental aesthetic similarity to a movie … But I believe Fifty Shades Freed is nonetheless not a movie at all, but something far more pure — a pristine document of the market economy, a kind of visual after-image created as an incidental side effect of the exchange of large sums of capital…We literally cannot perceive the truest form of Fifty Shades Freed, because to do so, we would have to be money ourselves.”

Sunrise over the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Best Moviegoing Experience: 2001: A Space Odyssey in IMAX

The Malco Paradiso’s IMAX screen, which opened last December, has quickly earned the reputation as the best theater in the city. During the late-summer lull, a new digital transfer of 2001: A Space Odyssey got a week’s run to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Even if you’ve watched Stanley Kubrick’s film a dozen times, seeing it the size it was intended to be seen is a revelation. Also, all lengthy blockbusters should come with an intermission.

Chuck, the canine star of Alpha

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Chuck, Alpha

Director Albert Hughes’ Alpha is a sleeper gem of 2018. The star of the story of how humans first domesticated dogs is a Czech Wolfhound named Chuck, who dominates the screen with a Lassie-level performance. Chuck and his co-star, Kodi Smit-McPhee, spend large parts of the movie silently navigating the hazards of Paleolithic Eurasia, and the dog nails both stunts and the occasional comedy bits. Chuck is a movie star.

KiKi Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk

Best Scene: The Family Meeting, If Beale Street Could Talk

Most of Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel is an intimate, tragic love story between Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne) and Fonny Hunt (Stephan James). But for about 10 minutes, it becomes an ensemble dramedy, when Tish has to tell, first, her parents that she’s pregnant out of wedlock with a man who has just been arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, then his parents. If you pulled this scene out of the film, it would be the best short of 2018.

Rukus

Best Memphis Movie: Rukus

Brett Hanover’s documentary hybrid had been in production for more than a decade by the time it made its Mid South debut at Indie Memphis 2018. What started as a tribute to a friend who had committed suicide slowly evolved into a mystery story, an exploration into a secretive subculture, and a diary of growing up and accepting yourself.

Ethan Hawk stars as a priest in existential crisis in First Reformed.

Best Screenplay: First Reformed

Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader penned and directed this piercing drama about a small town priest, played by Ethan Hawk, who undergoes a crisis of faith when a man he is counseling commits suicide. 72-year-old Schrader is unafraid to ask the big questions: Why are we here? Is it all worth it? His elegantly constructed story ultimately looks to love for the answers, but the journey there is harrowing.

Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger in Black Panther

MVP: Michael B. Jordan

Michael B. Jordan played a book-burning fireman with a conscience in HBO’s Fahrenheit 451 adaptation and the heavyweight champion of the world in Creed II. But it was his turn as Killmonger in Black Panther that elevated the year’s biggest hit film to the realm of greatness. Director Ryan Coogler knew what he was doing when he put his frequent collaborator in the the villain slot opposite Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa, making their personal rivalry into a battle for the soul of Wakanda.

Regina Hall in Support The Girls

Best Performance: (tie) Regina Hall, Support the Girls and Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade

In a year full of great performances, two really stood out. In Support the Girls, Regina Hall plays Lisa, a breastaurant manager having the worst day of her life, with a breathtaking combination of technique and empathy. We agonize with her over every difficult decision she has to make just to get through the day.

Elsie Fisher as Kayla in Eighth Grade

Elsie Fisher started work on Eighth Grade the week after the 13-year-old actually finished eighth grade. She carries the movie with one of the most raw, unaffected comic performances you will ever see.

Emma Stone takes aim in The Favourite.

Best Director: Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ previous efforts has been bracing, self-written satires, but he really came into his own with this kinda true story written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara. Everything clicks neatly into place in The Favourite. The central troika of Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz as backstabbing cousins vying for her favor are all stunning. The editing, sound mix, and costume design are superb, and I’ve been thinking about the meaning of a particular lens choice for weeks.

Daniel Tiger (left) and Fred Rogers, star of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood

Best Documentary: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Once in a while, a movie comes along that fills a hole in your heart you didn’t know you had. Morgan Neville’s biography of Fred Rogers appears as effortlessly pure as the man himself. Mr. Rogers’ radical compassion is the exact opposite of Donald Trump’s performative cruelty, and Neville frames his subject as a kind of national surrogate father figure, urging us to remember the better angels of our nature.

Sorry To Bother You

Best Picture: Sorry to Bother You

Boots Riley’s debut film is something of a bookend to my best picture choice from last year, Jordan Peele’s Get Out. They’re both absurdist social satires aimed at American racism set in a slightly skewed version of the real word. But where Get Out is a finely tuned scare machine, Sorry to Bother You is a street riot of ideas and images. When his vision occasionally outruns his reach, Riley pulls it off through sheer audacity. No one better captured the Kafkaesque chaos, anger, and confusion of living in 2018.

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Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk Anchors Huge Indie Memphis Lineup

Kiki Lane and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk

Director Barry Jenkins’ highly anticipated followup to his 2016 Best Picture Academy Award winner Moonlight will have its Mid South premiere at Indie Memphis 2018.

If Beale Street Could Talk (which is named after a W.C. Handy song, but not set in Memphis) is based on a 1974 novel by James Baldwin in which a woman, played by Kiki Lane, seeks to clear the name of her wrongly convicted husband, played by Stephan James. Jenkins made his Indie Memphis debut in 2008 with his first feature Medicine For Melancholy.

Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk Anchors Huge Indie Memphis Lineup (2)

Jenkins’ film is one of more than 40 features which will screen during the festival, which will take place November 1st-5th, with encore screenings November 7th-8th. The opening night feature is Mr. Soul, a documentary by directors Melissa Haizlip and Samuel D. Pollard, about Ellis Haizlip, the first black talk show host who regularly featured musicians like Stevie Wonder and Patti LaBelle on his program. Closing night is director Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls, about a day in the life of the employees of a sports bar. Bujalski previously appeared at Indie Memphis in 2013 with his groundbreaking feature Computer Chess.

Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk Anchors Huge Indie Memphis Lineup (3)


Boots Riley, the director of this year’s sleeper hit Sorry To Bother You, will be the keynote speaker at the Black Creatives Forum, a new program debuting at this year’s festival. Riley will also present a screening of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 surrealist masterpiece Brazil.

Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk Anchors Huge Indie Memphis Lineup (4)


Amy Seimetz, director of The Girlfriend Experience series and star of Upstream Color, will be on hand to present Barbara Loden’s Wanda, a rarely seen 1970 film that has been called a founding document of feminist cinema.

WANDA Trailer from Janus Films on Vimeo.

Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk Anchors Huge Indie Memphis Lineup (5)

On a lighter note, comedy legend Chris Elliott will be honored with a screening of his so-bad-its-good cult film Cabin Boy. No word on whether Elliott, who was a writer and performer on the original Late Night With David Letterman, will hide under the seats.

Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk Anchors Huge Indie Memphis Lineup (6)

A record 112 Memphis directors will have films in the festival this year, including Brett Hanover’s Rukus, a documentary/narrative hybrid years in the making which won the Grand Jury award at this year’s Nashville Film Festival.

Rukus (2018) – Trailer from Brett Hanover on Vimeo.

Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk Anchors Huge Indie Memphis Lineup

Indie Memphis will take place at the Orpheum Theatre’s Halloran Centre and at Playhouse On The Square, Studio On The Square, Theaterworks, and the Hattiloo Theatre. By popular demand, the block party will return, with the Cooper street blocked off during the weekend of the festival, and music and panels hosted in a giant tent. Festival passes are currently available on the Indie Memphis website. The Memphis Flyer will have continuing coverage of the festival throughout October and November. 

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Moonlight

Richard Linklater’s 2014 film Boyhood is rightly regarded as one of the 21st century’s masterpieces. It traces the story of one kid’s journey through adolescence, elevating the little details of life and change to epic storytelling by forcing us to look at them through the changing eyes of a boy trying to find his way in the world.

But Boyhood had some detractors who say the film’s “universal” experience of growing up isn’t really so universal, because the main character, Mason, is a white kid living in a predominantly white community in Texas. Make Mason an African American from a poor, urban neighborhood, and you’d have a vastly different movie, they say. Moonlight seems determined to prove that proposition.

I don’t really know what was in director Barry Jenkins’ head when he conceived of adapting the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, but the results speak for themselves. Jenkins’ lead character is Chiron, whom we first meet as a young boy living with his crack-addicted mother (Naomie Harris) in the Liberty City section of Miami. Shy and effeminate, Chiron is fleeing his classmate tormentors when he is rescued by Juan, a gangsta who finds his tough emotional exterior punctured by Chiron’s quivering vulnerability. Juan takes the terrified youngster back to his apartment where he and his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe) tend to the boy’s wounds and give him some food and compassion.

Mahershala Ali plays Juan with compassion in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight.

One of Boyhood‘s great selling points was its audacious experimental side. Linklater shot his film over the course of 11 years, with his stars aging in real time. Moonlight is also formally audacious, but in a different way. It is divided into three sections, showing Chiron in three different stages of his young life, each played by a different actor. Act one is called “Little,” after the name Chiron is given by the bullies at school. The second is “Chiron,” where the character is played as a high schooler by Ashton Sanders. The title of this segment suggests that we are seeing our hero’s real self. Chiron is still being bullied at school, and his mother’s addictions have now spiraled out of control, but there is light in his world, too. His relationship with Teresa continues to be a positive in his life, even as Juan is now out of the picture. And he has some friends, the closest of whom is Kevin (Jharrel Jerome). One day, while sharing a blunt on the beach, Kevin and Chiron’s friendship bubbles over into something more carnal. For a moment, it seems Chiron may have a sort of happiness that has eluded him all of his life. But then comes a betrayal that seems as inevitable as it does tragic, and brutal violence. For the third act, set 10 years later, Chiron is played by Trevante Rhodes, a former college track-and-field athlete whose supple brawn instantly speaks volumes about where Chiron, now known as Black, has found himself — hardened against the world, but utterly alone, with neither the love of his family nor the comfort of a lover.

Bringing three actors of such varying ages together to create a single, believable, and deeply sympathetic character is only the beginning of Jenkins’ achievement. He takes Monáe, a powerhouse singer and visionary afrofuturist musician, and transforms her into the film’s lone source of quiet empathy. The cinematography is both subtle and deeply visceral, transitioning from fluid, expressive Steadicam swoops to Kubrickian tableaus at will. One long crossfade between Black’s car rolling down the interstate and the waves rolling in on a Florida beach creates the momentary illusion that he’s driving on water, and it has not been far from my mind since I saw Moonlight.

Musician Janelle Monáe is unrecognizable as Theresa, a woman who treats the unfortunate Chiron with compassion in Moonlight.

The whole package is pulled together by the best musical score I’ve heard all year, created by composer Nicholas Britell, who previously scored Twelve Years a Slave. Britell combines the hip-hop that surrounds Chiron with twelve-tone, modernist classical to create a fresh, original soundscape. Combined with Jenkins’ sweeping visual lyricism, they create a synergy rarely seen outside Spielberg/Williams collaborations.

Moonlight is an achingly beautiful film of tragedy, love, and yearning. Its themes of growing up and finding yourself among a kaleidoscope of shifting identities seems particularly necessary in this moment when kindness and compassion seem to be in short supply. As the saying goes, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”