Idris Elba’s directorial debut, Yardie, has been acquired by Rialto Pictures, per a report from The Wrap. The gang drama is set to receive a theatrical release on March 15. The film originally premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018, and was later picked as the opening night film at this year’s Caribbean Film Festival at BAM in New York City.
“I’m very happy that this movie is going to get play in the States,” said Elba in a statement. “It falls in line with a very specific Afro Caribbean experience by the way of Kingston, Jamaica, and East London but plays right into the heart of the universal human experience of loss and trauma. My work as an actor both in the UK and US informed every decision I made as a director and my love of music give this film a pulse I know they will feel in Brooklyn!“
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Set in ’70s Kingston and ’80s Hackney, Yardie centers on the life of a young Jamaican man named D (Aml Ameen), who has never fully recovered from the murder, committed during his childhood, of his older brother Jerry Dread (Everaldo Creary). D grows up under the wing of a Kingston Don and music producer named King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd).
Fox dispatches him to London, where he reconnects with his childhood sweetheart, Yvonne (Shantol Jackson), and his daughter who he’s not seen since she was a baby. He also hooks up with a soundclash crew, called High Noon. But before he can be convinced to abandon his life of crime and follow “the righteous path”, he encounters the man who shot his brother 10 years earlier, and embarks on a bloody, explosive quest for retribution – a quest which brings him into conflict with vicious London gangster Rico (Stephen Graham).
Directed by Idris Elba, the screenplay for Yardie is by Brock Norman Brock and Martin Stellman, based on the novel by Victor Headley.
