Barry Jenkins, the Oscar-winning director and writer of the Best Picture-awarded film Moonlight, is teaming up with Amazon for his next project. Amazon announced Monday that Jenkins is set to write and direct a television adaptation of Colson Whitehead's novel The Underground Railroad, a story of slavery and the South intertwined with reinvented details — like a literal railroad system serving as the historic slave escape route. The fictional novel won the 2016 National Book Award.
"It's a groundbreaking work that pays respect to our nation's history while using the form to explore it in a thoughtful and original way. Preserving the sweep and grandeur of a story like this requires bold, innovative thinking," Jenkins said in a statement. "In Amazon we've found a partner whose reverence for storytelling and freeness of form is wholly in line with our vision."
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