Moonlight: The power beyond the narrative

An LGBT film with an all-black cast receives eight Oscar nominations, winning Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Ali and Best Adapted Screenplay for Jenkins and McCraney. Needless to say, Moonlight is phenomenal and incredible powerful.

The film is overwhelmingly an ensemble, auditory, and visual film. It does not rely on pathos for Chiron, although it is certainly generated. I believe it relies on its profound social commentary, and therefore the film's context is its most compelling feature, rather than plot or characters.

Moonlight tells us so much more than this boy's troubled story as he grows up black, gay, and poor. Moonlight stands for contemporary society, culture, and history, more than any other film I've seen this year.

I believe that the reflective and pensive state Moonlight brought over me is probably what Jenkins intended when composing an art piece which is in dubiously more profound than its primary narrative.