Barry Jenkins Biography

MARITAL STATUS
Professions Director , Screenwriter , Producer more
Nationality American
Birth November 19, 1979 (Miami, Florida, United States)

BIOGRAPHY
Barry Jenkins grew up in Miami in a family of four children. After finishing high school, he studied film at Florida State University in Tallahassee. After two short films, he made his first feature, Medicine for Melancholy , which tells the romance, in one day, of two young African-Americans who have just spent the night together. The filmmaker continued with several other short films and directed an episode of The Knick , a medical series with Clive Owen set at the beginning of the 20th century.

In 2017, his career took another turn with his second feature film, Moonlight . This aesthetic and realistic dive into the ghettos of Miami, which more particularly follows a young homosexual through three periods of his life (childhood, adolescence and adult life, after a stint in prison), receives numerous awards. Among them, the Oscar for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor ( Mahershala Ali ) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Moonlight is based on a play written by Tarell Alvin McCraney ).

Building on this critical but also commercial success (65 million dollars in revenue for a budget of around four million!), Barry Jenkins continues with If Beale Street Could Talk (2018). The story of this drama takes place in Harlem, in the 1970s, and features a young woman launched into a race against time to prove the innocence of her future husband accused of rape and incarcerated. This feature film, again very committed, allowed Regina King to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

At the same time, Barry Jenkins directed an episode of Dear White People and above all created The Underground Railroad for the Amazon Prime platform. Adapted from the best-selling novel by Colson Whitehead , this miniseries follows Cora ( Thuso Mbedu ), a slave on a Georgia plantation who boards a train and travels from state to state, in search of true freedom. But she is hunted by a famous slave hunter ( Joel Edgerton ). The filmmaker is directing the 11 episodes of the program which will be broadcast in early 2021.

In September 2020, Barry Jenkins was chosen to be at the helm of his first blockbuster: the highly anticipated prequel to The Lion King by Jon Favreau (which had grossed more than 1, 6 billion dollars worldwide!).

Laurent Schenck