In the Name of Love: Moonlight (2016)
Director: Barry Jenkins Run Time: 111 min. Rating: R Release Year: 2016
Starring: André Holland, Ashton Sanders, Janelle Monáe, Jharrel Jerome, Trevante Rhodes
Country: United States, United Arab Emirates
Language: English, Spanish
In the Name of Love at Gateway Film Center
Celebrate Pride Month at the Film Center with screenings of must-see LGBTQ+ stories throughout the month of June.
See the full lineupAbout the film:
Winner of three Oscars including Best Picture at the 2017 Academy Awards.
The tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality.
“A genre-defying film. Its visual splendor belies its tough, surface-level subject matter, while the performances pull us deep below that surface with their soulful naturalism.”
—Dan Jolin for Empire Magazine
About the filmmaker:
Filmmaker Barry Jenkins is best known for exploring issues of race, culture and sexuality in the well-regarded independent drama Medicine for Melancholy (2008) and Academy Award-winner Moonlight (2016). He attended college at Florida State University, where on a whim, he signed up for the school’s film program. There, he met and befriended fellow students Adele Romanski and James Laxton, who would later serve as producer and cinematographer, respectively, on Moonlight.
After directing several short films at Florida State, Jenkins directed his first feature, the independent romantic drama Medicine for Melancholy (2008). The film received excellent reviews and numerous nominations from national film festivals and awards, but was followed by a five-year period in which he developed several feature projects that never came to fruition. To support himself, Jenkins co-founded an advertising and content studio and wrote for the HBO drama The Leftovers. He eventually found his next project with In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, a play by Tarell Alvin McCraney. In 2013, he began production on the film version, Moonlight, a multi-part drama that follows a young African-American boy through three phases of his life, during which he explores issues of family, addiction and sexuality. The drama was among the most critically praised releases of 2016, netting numerous award nominations. Moonlight won the Oscar for Best Picture; Jenkins shared the Best Adapted Screenplay award with McCraney.
Jenkins followed the success of Moonlight with the James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) and served as a director and executive producer for the limited series The Underground Railroad (2021), for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series or Movie.
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