Special Online Conversation with Barry Jenkins, director of The Underground Railroad - The 92nd Street Y, New York
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On Demand

Reel Pieces

Recanati-Kaplan Talks
Reel Pieces with Annette Insdorf

Special Online Conversation with Barry Jenkins, director of The Underground Railroad

Jun 7, 2021


Moderator Annette Insdorf will interview Academy Award®-winner Barry Jenkins about his acclaimed new series, The Underground Railroad. Based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, the ten episodes — currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video — trace the journey of Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu), a slave who escapes a Georgia plantation and struggles for freedom in the antebellum South.

Jenkins’ second feature, Moonlight, won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2017, in addition to the Oscar that Jenkins received (with playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney) for Best Adapted Screenplay. If Beale Street Could Talk, his third feature, won Best Picture as well as Director at the Independent Spirit Awards.

The New York Times called The Underground Railroad “a stirring, full-feeling, technically and artistically and morally potent work,” and praised how “Jenkins gets it all. It’s as if he has figured out how to funnel more feeling through a camera lens than anyone else.” Cora is pursued by Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton), a bounty hunter obsessed with returning her to the plantation she escaped. The shadow of her mother looms: Cora was abandoned by Mabel, who became the only slave never caught by Ridgeway.

Watch The Underground Railroad on Amazon Prime before the discussion.

Annette Insdorf

Annette Insdorf is Professor of Film at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and Moderator of 92Y’s Reel Pieces series …

Annette Insdorf

Annette Insdorf is Professor of Film at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and Moderator of 92Y’s Reel Pieces series. She is the author of Francois Truffaut, a study of the French director's work; two books about Polish filmmakers—Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski and Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has; Philip Kaufman, and the landmark study, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (with a foreword by Elie Wiesel). Her latest book is Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes, and she received the Mel Novikoff Award from the 2018 San Francisco Film Festival.


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