Moonlight, the tender coming-of-age drama following a Black boy named Chiron as he grows up in Miami, came into the festival under the radar. But aft
Moonlight, the tender coming-of-age drama following a Black boy named Chiron as he grows up in Miami, came into the festival under the radar. But after it was released in select theaters in October 2016, it became a critically acclaimed sensation that would lead all the way to the Oscar stage.
A decade later, its legacy endures, both as an astounding artistic achievement and as one of the most singular episodes in Oscar history. Its best-picture win remains one of the most shocking moments ever to happen on the Academy Awards stage. At first, presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as the winner, and it was only after the team had taken the stage to give their acceptance speeches that the Oscar producers rushed on to reveal that the wrong envelope had been read and Moonlight was really the winner. While it was a monumental moment for the A24 film, it was also a bittersweet one for Jenkins and his team, who didn’t get to deliver a conventional acceptance speech amid all the chaos onstage.
Jenkins, who also won the best-adapted-screenplay Oscar along with his cowriter, Tarell Alvin McCraney, would quickly get back to work, making the drama If Beale Street Could Talk and the narrow series The Underground Railroad. He then helmed Disney’s 2024 prequel Mufasa: The Lion King.
Sitting down for a chat on the last day of the Telluride Film Festival, as rain threatened to break through the murky sky, Jenkins seemed on the precipice of a fresh chapter in his career. He’s gotten married (to filmmaker Lulu Wang) and had a child (a boy, who is around 15 months venerable), and he’s focused on two films that he has been developing for the past several years: Be My Baby, an A24 film starring Zendaya as singer Ronnie Spector, and a biopic about the choreographer Alvin Ailey. He hasn’t been on the set of a feature film as a director in years, and now that he’s ready, he’s determined to line up a few projects in a row. “I don’t want to make a film and then take all this time off,” he says, adding, “there’s a couple little secret things that we’re working on as well.”
But before he moves forward, he takes a moment (with some resistance) to look back. It had been years since he watched Moonlight all the way through, but he did so for the fresh 4K remastered cut that A24 will release in theaters on October 2. He spoke with Vanity Fair about the birth of Moonlight at the festival, the emotions it brings up in him now, and the Oscar moment that sent him to therapy.
