USA TODAY
Barry Jenkins knows full well the traumatizing effect of film and TV depictions of the inhumanity of slavery.
But the director of Oscar-winning 2016 film Moonlight found compelling reasons to adapt Colson Whitehead s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Underground Railroad, into a 10-episode Amazon series (streaming Friday) that conveys the resiliency of those enduring such brutality.
Jenkins, the writer, director and executive producer of Railroad, saw an opportunity to tell a story about an institution whose repercussions are still felt, from a perspective that has often been neglected. As I grew as a person, it became very clear that it was necessary for me to use my voice to speak to my heritage here as a Black person in America, he says. Yet I also know how fraught those images (of slavery) are, how fraught even acknowledging this history is, both within my community and outside it. And I ve never had that before working on a piece of art. It s
The Underground Railroad: A strange disorienting masterpiece
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Underground Railroad tells an unflinching story of slavery
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Review: Barry Jenkins The Underground Railroad adaptation is overwhelming and triumphant Kelly Lawler, USA TODAY
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In Moonlight director Barry Jenkins adaptation of Colson Whitehead s celebrated 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, a conductor claims that riding its rails will show the true face of America.
The new Amazon miniseries (streaming Friday, ★★★½ out of four) certainly endeavors to do that, via a vast epic of pain and trauma, yes, but also humanization and occasional rays of light. The primary conceit of Whitehead s novel is that the metaphorical Underground Railroad in the antebellum South – a historical network of routes and safe houses used by enslaved African Americans to escape to the Northern U.S. or Canada during slavery – was a literal one, with trains, conductors and stations.