Bar­ry Jenk­ins hits the small screen with The Under­ground Rail­road trailer

The films of Bar­ry Jenk­ins have formed a col­lage of Black life through the years, from the mid­cen­tu­ry peri­od of If Beale Street Could Talk to the life­long sprawl of Moon­light. For his next project, he’s going back to the roots of African-Amer­i­can iden­ti­ty and tack­ling the del­i­cate top­ic of slav­ery head-on.

The first trail­er for his new minis­eries The Under­ground Rail­road has sur­faced online, promis­ing a more expan­sive vision over its ten episodes than a fea­ture run time can hope to con­tain. In the adap­ta­tion of Col­son Whitehead’s Pulitzer-win­ning his­tor­i­cal fic­tion nov­el, an escaped slave named Cora (Thu­so Mbedu) makes her way from Geor­gia to the promise of free­dom along the famed route through the South, albeit with some key alter­ations to the fac­tu­al record.

While the ​“Under­ground Rail­road” was in actu­al­i­ty a net­work of hous­es and oth­er refuges hos­pitable to Black men and women on the run, in the minis­eries, it’s rep­re­sent­ed as a lit­er­al sub­ter­ranean train sys­tem fer­ry­ing for­mer slaves to safe­ty. Cora and her com­pan­ion Cae­sar (Aaron Pierre) embark upon a per­ilous odyssey north­ward, their stretch­es on the loco­mo­tive punc­tu­at­ed by har­row­ing expe­ri­ences in an Amer­i­ca gov­erned by unveiled racism.

Not one but two Mid­som­mar bit play­ers (Will Poul­ter and William Jack­son Harp­er) appear as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er and con­duc­tor, respec­tive­ly, along with a sup­port­ing cast that col­lects Joel Edger­ton, Chase W Dil­lon, Damon Her­ri­man, Lily Rabe, and stage sen­sa­tion Amber Gray. They play friends and foes to our pair of jour­ney­ing heroes, peo­pling a world fraught with tragedy and yet not with­out hope.

Jenk­ins has amply proven him­self to be one of the most prodi­gious­ly tal­ent­ed film­mak­ers of his gen­er­a­tion, and see­ing those skills flour­ish on the wider-yet-small­er can­vas offered by the stream­ing for­mat is an entic­ing prospect indeed. The trail­er has all the hall­marks that have endeared his work to cinephiles – lush cin­e­matog­ra­phy, poignant close-up work, the swoon­ing music of Nicholas Britell. The spring’s biggest release may not be a movie, but it’s almost here.

The Under­ground Rail­road comes to Ama­zon on 14 May.