After working with the likes of David Simon, Cary Fukunaga, Kenneth Branagh, Guillermo del Toro, Ridley Scott, and more, Idris Elba has now stepped behind the camera for his directorial debut. Yardie, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival a few weeks ago and will hit U.K. theaters soon, is based on Victor Headley’s book, which follows a man who tracks down his brother’s killer–a murder which occurred a decade prior–in East London.
“When the opportunity came, I read the script and realized that everything that was in the script I could certainly amplify with some truth,” Elba told Deadline. “I was there in that time period. I know the people the book was about. I’ve met these people and been in the areas. So I felt like this was something that wasn’t going to be too much of a departure from who I am.”
See the trailer and poster below for the film starring Aml Ameen, Shantol Jackson, Sheldon Shepherd, and Everaldo Cleary.
Set in ’70s Kingston and ’80s Hackney, Yardie centres 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).
Yardie hits U.K. theaters this year.