If you’ve been holding your breath waiting for Moonlight director Barry Jenkins’s next movie, then you can take in the sweet air once again. Variety reports that the Oscar winner will be helming an adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk, based on the novel by James Baldwin. The book centers on Fonny and Tish, a Harlem couple in the 1970s who go through hell after Fonny is accused of rape, and Tish finds out that she’s pregnant with his child while he’s in prison. With her family and his lawyer, Tish searches for evidence that could free Fonny before the baby arrives. As Variety reports, Jenkins has been working toward making this movie for years, having written the screenplay for it during the same summer in which he wrote Moonlight. Jenkins has secured the blessing of the Baldwin family, with the author’s sister saying, “We are delighted to entrust Barry Jenkins with this adaptation. Barry is a sublimely conscious and gifted filmmaker, whose Medicine for Melancholy impressed us so greatly that we had to work with him.”
