6Moonlight (2016)

Barry Jenkins’ 2017 Oscar- and Writers Guild Award-winning screenplay, divided into three equally compelling coming-of-age chapters in the life of a young Black man in Miami, is an adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unpublished play In the Moonlight, Black Boys Look Blue. Jenkins and McCraney both grew up in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, raised by mothers who struggled with drug addiction. While adapting McCraney’s work, Jenkins told the podcast Script Apart, he realized how the screenplay would invariably be this “combined biography of myself and Tarell’s life.”

READ: Barry Jenkins illuminates the lunar landscape with Moonlight.