Alvin Ailey Biopic Coming From ‘Moonlight’ Director Barry Jenkins
By Chris Evangelista/June 3, 2019 4:30 pm EST
Jenkins and company will work with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Artistic Director Robert Battle and Artistic Director Emerita, Judith Jamison, to bring Ailey’s life and work to life on the big screen. Julian Breece, who wrote the Netflix series When They See Us, is handling the script.
I’ll confess I know next to nothing about Alvin Ailey, but I’m excited to see what Jenkins does with material like this. He’s proven himself to be one of the best filmmakers working right now, and he excels at capturing emotion in poetic, romantic ways. I have no doubt he’ll bring something unique to this. I just hope people pay attention to it. I thought Jenkins’s previous film, If Beale Street Could Talk, was a bonafide masterpiece. But the movie didn’t generate nearly as much buzz as I was expecting – something that seems to be a reoccurring problem for Beale Street’s distributor Annapurna Pictures.
