From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.

The film Medicine for Melancholy made a big splash on the independent film festival

circuit last year. And it's writer-director, Barry Jenkins, is sitting right across from me at KQ.

U.D. in San Francisco. Barry, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. I mean, I saw the

film in South by Southwest last year. It seemed like it was the perfect festival for a film like this. Yeah, I think everything we did was tailored towards taking the movie to South by Southwest.

We just felt like, you know, the characters in the film, the music, all those elements.

You know, 20% of the bands on the soundtrack are bands that are based in Austin,

which is something that really just happened by chance.

So, yeah, it was great to premiere the movie there.

If I can ask you to explain what the movies about it, because it's kind of a bare-bones story anyway,

because you can do that. Yeah, it's really simple. The movie is about a guy and a girl will have a one-night stand.

The movie starts the morning after. The guy wants everything to do with the girl. The girl wants

nothing to do with the guy.

And so, of course, they spend the next 24 hours getting to know one another and the city of San Francisco,

which eventually becomes more than just the backdrop for the film, but really like the motivator and like the third character in this love triangle.

And it's interesting because, you know, whenever there is, especially a male African-American

character in a film, there's an accepted wisdom that he's going to be angry.

And he does carry some anger, but the anger is not about race, but in fact, about his own state

of being kind of lost.

It was really important to me to put these characters on the screen because I felt like

I hadn't seen them in a movie

...