Academy Award winning writer-director Barry Jenkins is all set to direct a biopic about the late iconic African-American choreographer, Alvin Ailey. First announced in March 2018 by Fox Searchlight, in conjunction with the Ailey Organisation, the film will see singer-songwriter Alicia Keys turn producer.
Based on the Julian Breece script, the film will trace the life of Ailey, who from being raised in Texas by a single mother, founded the interracial Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre in New York in 1958 and helped popularise modern dance. Ailey’s Revelations is one of the most-performed modern dance pieces in history and he received the Kennedy Centre Honours in 1988, a year before he died at the age of 58 from AIDS-related complications. In 2014, former US President Barack Obama selected Ailey to be a posthumous recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The dance company’s artistic directors Robert Battle and Judith Jamison are also on board the project, which includes the rights to Jennifer Dunning’s biography Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance.
Jenkins won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Moonlight, for which he also received a directing nomnation. He was nominated once again this year in the Best Adapted Screenplay category for If Beale Street Could Talk.