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Filmmaker Barry Jenkins Explores Love in a Time of Clorox

Last week we brought you a film made by one of the nominees for Breakthrough Director at the Gotham Awards. This week we bring a film from another nominee, Barry Jenkins, whose debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy, is also currently up for three Independent Spirit Awards, including Best First Feature. (It’ll be in theaters in February.) His 2003 short My Josephine is a lovely, impressionistic look at an Arab man and woman who work in a laundromat, washing American flags for free. That may make it sound like a Message Movie, but it’s not. Told from the perspective of the lovelorn male in this relationship, this is a quiet, unassumingly lyrical film, shot with the kind of detail that reveals both the director’s understanding of human nature and his keen eye for evocative imagery.

Filmmaker Barry Jenkins Explores Love in a Time of Clorox