One of the interesting things about growing up in Miami is that you see a lot of film and television productions. I remember seeing a Harrier jet in the middle of the street near my father’s office because True Lies was being shot there. Scenes from The Crew and episodes of Burn Notice were shot a few blocks from my childhood apartment. The causeway by my high school was shut down because they needed to shoot, of all things, the music video for Sisqo’s “Thong Song”. And these were just the productions that I personally encountered, there were tons more that I won’t bother naming. Yet in all these years of seeing my hometown on big and small screens, there wasn’t a single one of them that told a real Miami story about real Miami people from real Miami communities. Everything was some kind of cheap music video, some capitalist nouveau riche fantasy, some tropical bikini fantasy for white people. You never hear about the immigrants from all over Latin America and the world hustling in warehouses, flipping merchandise, laying marble tiles, praying in strip-mall churches. You never hear about how the City let public housing be cannibalized by fancy contractors so that they could build private residences to push subprime mortgages with. And you sure as hell don’t hear about the black and brown people living in Liberty City, much less about those that are queer. But that is what makes Moonlight a film of rare power, in that it renders, in masterful strokes of black and blue, a story that was once invisible. Personally, the film resonated deeply with me, even though my young life in Miami was different from Chiron and Kevin’s. For the first time in my 30+ years, I saw fragments of familiar experiences (riding sad in a sad metromover, smoking a blunt on South Beach at night, jokes about jitneys, black beans from Cuban diners) in a film of staggering beauty, written and directed by fellow Miamians working with a Miami crew. And holy shit, it was the best film of the year. <3 [Edit: It actually fucking won best picture]
