Barry Jenkins Says He Specifically Made ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ For A Black Audience

And what about white audiences? He isn’t worried about cultural tourism. “If the film was engineered expressly for white people to experience black pain, then I would feel a certain kind of way. … Being the creator of the piece, I know that’s not my intent. Having read the novel, I feel like that wasn’t Mr. Baldwin’s intent. I think because of that, I don’t feel any kind of way about the experience of a shared audience experiencing the work.”  – HuffPost