Oscar winner Barry Jenkins has announced his first picture post-Moonlight, with Variety reporting that Jenkins will be directing an adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk. The 1974 novel focuses on a woman and her family working to clear her fiancee’s name, after he’s framed for rape by a bigoted policeman.
Baldwin’s name is riding almost as high as Jenkins’ at the moment: The fiery author, who died in 1987, was pulled back into the public consciousness last year with Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, based off of one of his abandoned non-fiction books.
Beale Street isn’t the only project Jenkins currently has in the works; he’s also been tapped to direct a TV series based on the Underground Railroad, based off a book by Colson Whitehead, for Amazon.