Watch the first trailer for 'Moonlight' director Barry Jenkins' new film

It’s been two years since Moonlight won Best Picture at the Oscars (along with Best Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali and Best Adapted Screenplay for Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney), and now we’ve got a first look at his new film. 

The drama, entitled If Beale Street Could Talk, follows a man wrongly imprisoned of rape and his pregnant lover campaigning to get him out - it’s an adaptation of the 1974 novel of the name name, written by James Baldwin.

Here’s the trailer:

Stephan James, who plays Fonny, said at the Essence Film Festival in New Orleans:

“With such beautiful nuances, when I first read the script, it reminded me of Romeo and Juliet. That love is the center of this film. Fonny and Tish know each other, they are so close.”

Jenkins added:

“I tend to not have a face in my head when I’m writing a script or when I first start casting. In Moonlight, we were lucky because nobody knew who anyone was so we could cast whoever we wanted and I tried to approach this the same way. Who is going to reveal themselves as Fonny and Tish?”

“With the precipice of love so early in these characters lives, we needed to have people we saw on-screen to be tender, have that nervous energy, but still know each other. Stephan and Kiki had that together.”

The film is written and directed by Barry Jenkins, and stars Kiki Layne, Teyonah Parris (Dear White People) and Brian Tyree Henry (Atlanta) and will hit cinemas on January 18 in the UK - a full month after its US release, what a liberty!

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(Image: YouTube)