Visually more sophisticated than the bulk of features to yet come out of the new wave of DIY independent American cinema, narratively smoother and yet still boundless in mold-breaking ambition, triple-Independent Spirit Award nominee Medicine for Melancholy offers a self-contained rebuttal to claims that precious, naturalistic dramas about the existential dilemmas of hipster singles are exclusively a white man’s game. But the most exciting thing about the film is that director Barry Jenkins doesn’t seem interested in rebutting anything, or in playing any sort of game but his own. His mission: to talk about what it feels like to be young, black and artsy in a city in which people who fit that description make up a minuscule fraction of the population.

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It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Barry Jenkins’ film Medicine for Melancholy, and we’re lucky enough to have Barry be big fans of Spout as well. His little film has had a long journey since it premiered in Austin at SXSW earlier this year, and it’s continuing to take him around the world.

We spoke with Barry in Toronto about the genesis of the movie, what has happened since that first screening in Austin, how he found the actors, and if this film represents a love letter from him to the city of San Francisco. Read on for the full interview.

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• Erin at Steady Diet of Film alerts us to the news (which we might have figured out for ourselves, except that we have a bad habit of being in bars at 11pm on weeknights––we swear, we’re working on cutting back on that) that Medicine for Melancholy star Wyatt Cenac is now a correspondent for The Daily Show. His first segment, in which he attempts to understand primary season through the rubrick of plot developments on Lost, is embedded above. We’ll give you a preview: “A polar bear on a tropical island? There are so many reasons why that’s AMAZING!”
• Stacy Peralta’s was reproached for his lackadaisical sense of style by the gang member subjects of his doc Made in America. He tells Vulture: “These guys don’t step out the house unless they’re dressed really well. In fact, a couple of our subjects took me to task for how I looked. I’d be wearing a pair of Levis and a T-shirt, and they’d ask me, ‘Do you dress like that every day? You oughta think about how you dress more often.’”
• The MPAA be damned, Ridley Scott might make an uncensored film based on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and the very prospect has filmdrunk oversharing. Concludes a post headlined “BONER ALERT”: “Like all really violent things, it makes me slightly sexually excited.  That’s healthy, right?”