Do we like Barry Jenkins?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean harm record and a career spent telling stories about people who rarely got them, but little detail on the personal side.
Jenkins grew up poor and Black in Miami, in Liberty City and its Liberty Square housing projects, looked after by relatives and community members. Sport was his way out: football and track took him to Florida State, where he stumbled into the film program because it sat next to the football fields. He has said of Moonlight, “This movie should not exist.”
The road wasn't smooth. His 2008 debut, Medicine for Melancholy, got strong reviews and three Independent Spirit nominations, but follow-up projects never got made and he wound up writing for TV series The Leftovers. Then he adapted Tarell Alvin McCraney's unproduced play into Moonlight, which earned eight Oscar nominations.
On the harm check, the record is clean as far as we could find. He has talked openly about telling a gay Black story, and on why representation matters he told TIME: “When images do arise to fill that lack, they take on added importance.” We found no anti-LGBTQ+, anti-woman, anti-migrant or climate-denial statements from him, and nothing about the company he keeps that raised a flag.
There was an Oscars scrap of sorts. After the best picture mix-up, he said it fed some people's “unsavoury thoughts” that Moonlight won because it was a Black film, and he found the moment frightening. He has also said that during awards season a driver used a racial slur about him, and he tied it to the push to keep telling these stories: “We've got to tell these damn stories.”
The one proper stoush was online. When he took on Disney's Mufasa: The Lion King, a follower called Disney a “soulless machine”, and Jenkins shot back that there was nothing soulless about The Lion King. It was a spat about taste and selling out, not harm, and it says more about a director who bites back than a bad one.
On the good stuff, A24 announced in 2017 that he would partner with My Brother's Keeper Alliance, a mentoring coalition for young men of colour. This year's WLRN piece also shows him still talking about the Miami he came from, and describing places like Liberty City as “ecosystems just like anywhere else.”