August 6, 2021: "A Night at the Movies" with Barry Jenkins and David Thomson

August 6, 2021: “A night at the movies” with Academy Award-winning director Barry Jenkins and acclaimed film critic and historian David Thomson

Academy Award-winning writer-director Barry Jenkins co-wrote and directed Moonlight, winner of the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Picture. In 2018, Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk received three Academy Award nominations and won Best Picture at the Independent Spirit Awards. His most recent work is the Emmy-nominated limited series The Underground Railroad, adapted for Amazon Prime from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Jenkins’ upcoming work includes a follow up to The Lion King, as well as a biopic of famed choreographer Alvin Ailey.

“Jenkins gets it all.  It’s as if he has figured out how to funnel more feeling through a camera lens than anyone else.”—James Poniewozik, New York Times

“I got into film school…You know, I had a brief moment where I wasn’t sure if I could do it.
I didn’t know you needed light to expose film.”—Barry Jenkins

David Thomson is the author of the newly published A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors, as well as more than twenty-five other books about cinema, including The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and How to Watch a Movie. Thomson taught film studies at Dartmouth College and has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, Film Comment, Movieline, Salon, and The New Republic. He has served on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival and wrote the award-winning documentary The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind.

“David Thomson is, without doubt, the greatest living film historian, archivist, and professional fan.”—Allen Barra, Los Angeles Times

“We sat in the dark for nearly a century; we were travelling together…We were strangers there, but fellow pilgrims, and the cinema was a palace for our wondering.”—David Thomson

Please join us for this special conversation on Friday, August 6, at 7:00 p.m. EDT.

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