‘Underground Railroad’ Director Barry Jenkins Sees Film As An ‘Empathy Machine’

FOR director Barry Jenkins, filming The Underground Railroad has been the most difficult undertaking of his career.

Amazon’s new series based is based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an enslaved teenage girl who escapes from a brutal Georgia plantation.

The series, which was filmed in Georgia, depicts the underground railroad as a literal train that secretly transports people who have escaped enslavement and make stops in different states.

Jenkins says there were times when he wept on set while depicting the brutality of slavery: “It was incredibly difficult, partly because we were standing in places where there was a feeling that … these atrocities had occurred,” he says.

Jenkins directed Moonlight, which won the 2017 Oscar for Best Picture, as well as the 2018 adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel, If Beale Street Could Talk. He says working on The Underground Railroad connected him with his own