As Oscar season gets underway there will be more and more films hailed as the best of the year, the best of the decade, or true masterpieces. Very few films will actually live up to those monikers. MOONLIGHT is all three.
MOONLIGHT’s power lies in its intimate connection to the source text, an unproduced play by Tarell Alvin McCraney called In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. McCraney and director Barry Jenkins grew up a block away from each other in Miami, yet did not meet until they began working on the film. That connection is beyond coincidence; it seems almost fated as you experience the specificity of the characters and the spectacular, sweeping vision of the film.
In an interview in the Miami New Times McCraney said the film was “one of the most personal pieces [he’s] written and certainly the most autobiographical.” According to Jenkins, MOONLIGHT is a marriage of their artistic voices:
“I don’t think I could have written this thing without Tarell. And there’s a couple of key scenes that I really went to the ends of the Earth to preserve, because it came from a first-person experience that I didn’t have… I thought about it a lot at the outset, but once I felt like there was a concrete way where I could preserve Tarell’s voice, but also take ownership of it at the same time, I didn’t worry about it again.”
MOONLIGHT is a groundbreaking work of art that highlights the power of collaboration and shared experiences.
— Diana Martinez, Film Streams Education Director
