Delroy Lindo has wrapped production on his directorial debut, and he didn’t go small for his first time behind the camera, or in front of it. Jabari’s People, a Jamaican-set family drama, recently completed a 22-day shoot in Kingston, with Lindo directing and starring alongside a cast of 14, including Winston Duke, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Wendell Pierce, and rising actor Seyi Andes-Pelumi.
The film, written by Daoud Abeid and Dakhil Hausif, unfolds between Brooklyn and Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, following Jabari, a gifted but defiant Brooklyn teenager sent to live with estranged grandparents after his mother’s sudden death. What starts as exile turns into something deeper, a reckoning across three generations with grief, identity, and long-buried family wounds.
Andes-Pelumi leads the cast as Jabari. Duke plays his overwhelmed father, Jean-Baptiste his emotionally attuned grandmother, and Lindo himself takes on the role of Jabari’s disciplined grandfather. Pierce rounds out the principal cast as a doctor within the family’s New York community, alongside an ensemble of Jamaican actors: Rolando Alberts, Sekai Smart-Macaulay, Kimberly Patterson, Jeff Crossley, Kadeem Wilson, Sule Thelwell, Everaldo Creary, Djamari Roberts, Shernet Swearine, and Zoe Daniele ChingSang.
The road to production stretched back nearly a decade. Lindo was first approached about the project in 2015 as an acting role, but that version never came together. When the rights resurfaced in 2021, he optioned the script himself, pulled in by his own Jamaican roots and a desire to put a different, more spiritual side of the island on screen than audiences typically see. That same lineage threads through a separate project Lindo has in the works: a memoir centered on his mother’s experience as part of the Windrush generation, expected in 2027.
Lindo produces Jabari’s People through his Mudtop Productions banner, alongside Robert A. Maylor, Lena Cordina, and Natalie Thompson. Susan Rockefeller, Regina K. Scully, and Melony Lewis serve as executive producers. IAG is handling distribution rights. No release date has been set.