Scarlett Cinema's Pamela Kerpius catches up with filmmaker and SM staff writer Barry Jenkins about his debut feature, currently in production, Medicine for Melancholy. An excerpt:

[Pamela Kerpius] Race is a primary topic of your film, obviously too. Is that something your characters address outright, or is it something unspoken because the characters are black?

[Barry Jenkins] No, it’s addressed outright. It’s totally addressed outright. And it came about, it stems from a broken heart; I had a girlfriend here and it didn’t work out. We broke up and it was my first functional interracial relationship. A lot of the conversation in the script we had, the two of us did, me and my Caucasian girlfriend. It was funny, because at one point we got into a really serious discussion, and I asked her the question, I said, “Did you ever talk about [race] with your exes?” I asked why not, and she said “Why would we?” And I said well, I talk about race with black people all the time. It made me think about how different people treat race across ethnicities, and then I thought about how in this city, maybe black people don’t talk about race as much? I don’t know, you’re tripping me up here!

Well, my next question is about the places you’ve been—L.A., San Francisco, some time in Telluride, Colorado, Tallahassee, and inner-city Miami where you were born and raised. Thinking of the places you’ve been to in the past, and the ideas you have about being a black male artist in primarily white cities; how is space conceptualized in your film, how do memories from these places in your past manifest themselves in a totally different space like San Francisco, where you’re guiding these characters?

I don’t think they do at all. San Francisco is beautiful, and it doesn’t look like any other place I’ve ever been. It’s one of those things, it’s a beautiful, amazing city; it’s unique and doesn’t remind me of any other place I’ve ever been, but all the small deficiencies I’ve seen, and in all the other cities I’ve been to, as a black male, they’re all kind of magnified here. It’s one of those things, I can’t comprehend it—every little social issue that I’ve ever taken note of is magnified here in San Francisco, and I think that’s why it’s the right place to for the script. I can’t imagine making it anywhere else, it wouldn’t make sense in L.A., it wouldn’t make sense in Chicago, or New York; but in San Francisco the gentrification is more different than it is anywhere else. It’s a city, that’s not necessarily coming apart at the seams, but it’s changing so rapidly that no one can get a grip on it. When you put characters in a setting like that, it has no choice but to become a character.