It had to be a full circle moment for Moonlight writer, Tarell Alvin McCraney and director Barry Jenkins this week when the Miami-bred talents became immortalized by a street name.
As reported by the Miami News-Times, the Miami-Dade commissioners announced Tuesday that they’re re-naming a Liberty City street “Moonlight Way” in honor of the Academy Award-winning film.
“This movie — at least what I got from it — really depicts the life of how a lot of us were raised and what we had to go through and endure as children in the inner city,” says Commissioner Audrey Edmonson, who is sponsoring the item.
“This goes out to children still living here in the inner city that are told they’ll never amount to anything. It shows that it doesn’t matter how you were raised or where you grew up; you can still turn out to be someone.”
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Inspired by McCraney’s life growing up, the film chronicles a young boy who struggles with a drug-addicted mother and coming to terms with his sexuality in one of Miami’s roughest neighborhoods.
“The way in which the community interacted with these people was so peripheral and marginalizing that I didn’t get a chance to know how they could be integrated into the world around us,” McCraney told The Guardian about LGTB people in his neighborhood.
“That’s on us as a community and us as people. It’s important for us to be representational as people in communities and not get this xenophobic idea of living in this homogenized world.”