Film screening: Moonlight

The story of Chiron’s childhood, boyhood and youth as a black guy from a dysfunctional single-parent family who finds his identity through violence, drug addiction, and the gradual acceptance of his sexuality.

An Oscar-winning film by Barry Jenkins, Moonlight is an independent drama in three parts that combines a classic Bildungsroman with a modern take on race, gender, and identity.

Introverted Chiron lives with his mother in a troubled district of Miami and finds a friend and father figure in Juan, who deals drugs but also tries to protect the boy and explain to him that a different life is possible. Chiron is bullied at school because of what most students see as his lack of masculinity, the desire for which pushes him to reciprocate violence.

Based on young African-American dramaturge Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, the film was the cinematic revelation of 2016: an indie film by the young and almost unknown at the time African-American director Barry Jenkins, it not only unexpectedly earned him the Oscar for Best Picture but also consolidated and popularized the «identity film» genre, in which the protagonists’ (and often the authors’) gender, sexuality, race, and class form defining narratives for making and perceiving cinema.

The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.