In 2008, I saw a movie at the Chicago International Film Festival called “Medicine for Melancholy,” which was an independent film by writer-director Barry Jenkins. It was a great film about a Black couple’s relationship that begins from a one-night stand. That film was described as “a study in class, race and Black identity, against the beautiful backdrop of San Francisco.”

Seven months ago, the Oscars ceremony once again demonstrated that stories about straight white men tend to go down well with groups mostly populated by straight white men. It was the second year running that no acting nominees of colour were nominated and, as ratings fell and the call for diversity mounted, the Academy resorted to radical measures. At the end of June, an unprecedented number of new members were invited to join, 40% of them female or from minorities – and, sometimes, both.

Philosophers rarely think about acting in the theatrical sense, but they do have a
discourse of 'acts' that maintains associative semantic meanings with theories of
performance and acting. For example, John Searle's 'speech acts,' those verbal assurances and promises which seem not only to refer to a speaking relationship, but
to constitute a moral bond between speakers, illustrate one of the illocutionary gestures that constitutes the stage of the analytic philosophy of language.

Barry Jenkins' Academy Award-winning film, Moonlight (2016), portrays sexuality in a manner that aligns with Judith Butler's seminal theory on gender performativity. In her interdisciplinary writing on phenomenology and feminist theory, (Butler, 1988) she asserts that
‘gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo'.

The buzz right now is for a film named Moonlight. The film, the second for writer-director Barry Jenkins, tells a haunting tale of a boy named Chiron whose battle throughout life is coming to terms with his identity as a gay black man. That identity is complicated by merciless taunts at school and a home life surrounded by drugs and hard drug dealers.

The combination of artistry and emotional directness in this film is overwhelming. Barry Jenkins writes and directs, having adapted Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unproduced play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. Moonlight is about a young African American man and his coming of age, presented as three stages in his life, like the panels of a triptych.

Barry Jenkins’ beautifully understated film Moonlight has been hailed almost unanimously by film critics as one of the best movies of 2016. Nominated for six Golden Globe awards, including best film and best director, Moonlight delves into the intersections of race, class, and sexuality in a very localized manner, shot almost entirely in Liberty City, a poor, black neighborhood of Miami that has rarely been captured on the big screen.

One of the most important scenes in the film comes when Juan teaches Chiron how to swim. The scene is superb visually because it perfectly encapsulates the life that Chiron is about to have. If he doesn’t learn how to ride out the incoming waves, it will swallow him up whole and consume him. He has to learn how to swim in order to face the waves (challenges) that are about to come his way.

I attended a campus screening of the film Moonlight on Monday night at the University of Alabama (shout out to Lamar Wilson, Jennifer Jones and Steve Mobley, Jr. for hosting). Moonlight is a coming of age film about black boyhood, masculinity, sexual identity, friendship, love, and chosen family.

Moonlight is a small but special film. It’s delicate and entirely necessary. It follows two young boys who grow up together in a drug-riddled black neighborhood in Miami. One is able to hide his open sexuality by flexing hetero-confidence and the other is routinely picked on, hangs his head low, and bounces between his drug addict mother’s home and the local dealer who provides him a safe and understanding house whenever needed.

Perhaps Chiron's control over his own identity is best mirrored in the way he chooses to either shed or grow into his given names. Just after teaching Little to swim, Juan explains that his former nickname, "Blue," was given to him by a stranger who remarked that black boys look blue in the moonlight, a touching and poignant anecdote.