I often think about an experience I had in 2012, when I went to see “12 Years a Slave” for the first time. I was, I am almost positive, the only black person in the theater. Next to me sat a Desi girl, and I remember catching her eye briefly at the end of the film, as the credits rolled and we all solemnly filed out of the theater. She gave me a look of empathy, which struck me, mostly because none of the white people exiting the film made any eye contact with me at all.

This is a fragment of what it is to experience a movie that’s viscerally black in a space that isn’t black. It brings up feelings. It brings up questions. Questions like: What is going through the minds of the white folk around me as they watch this movie, as they watch this black pain? Why do I sometimes feel uncomfortable with this scenario? What is it about their gaze on the screen that makes me feel like I’m the one being watched?

These questions came up again in November, after a screening of “If Beale Street Could Talk” at the SVA Theatre in Manhattan, during a Q&A session with director Barry Jenkins. After a series of questions about the music in the film, the cinematography, the writing, a black woman in the center of the auditorium wanted to ask about his “intent, the audience and the universal versus the specific.”

“For me, this felt like a very, very black movie, and when the credits were rolling and I was sobbing, it felt almost painful to be in here with so many white people,” she said.

“It feels like, to me, something that transmits rather than explains, so for your thinking and your intent ― I know that you’re an artist and create the most beautiful emotive art that you can ― but do you ever think about that?”

Her question seemed to shift the energy in the room, if only because the optics of the auditorium, which held a diverse array of people but, indeed, many white folk, hadn’t really come up until now. Also, her question highlighted the precarious position of the black filmmaker today. It’s not just a matter of the long-standing unspoken expectation that black filmmakers must always embed a message into their art. It’s also that, even if they’re making movies now that do not cater to the white gaze or perspective, they still have to navigate an industry that historically has privileged the white perspective above all others.

But Jenkins answered, almost before she finished asking the question, “I don’t think about it.”

He elaborated:

I think when white people make their films, they don’t think about us. And that’s totally fine. Because when Stanley Kubrick made [“2001: A Space Odyssey”], he was just making “2001.” But if some kid in Harlem, in Liberty City, in Watts, watches “2001,” he’s going to be transported in this way that he should be transported. Now, the problem is some [white] suburban kid, in the middle of nowhere, in Kansas or Iowa, doesn’t get the same opportunity to be transported into my life. Doesn’t get the same opportunity to be transported into Chiron’s life. But when we make these movies, it’s not about giving him these opportunities, it’s not about making it for him, but it’s there. And I have no problem with him coming into the auditorium, sitting down and experiencing it. The same way that you did. So it’s not something I’m intellectually aiming for or geared towards, but I feel no kind of way about it. I think it’s kind of awesome that the movie can exist on this plane. I think this one here is aggressively black, but it doesn’t mean you can’t receive it if you’re not black.

I asked Jenkins about the exchange the next day during a one-on-one conversation, and he remembered it distinctly; it had stayed with him.

“As I was leaving, I got in the car, I was still thinking about that question,” he said. “I was still thinking about that question.”

This idea of who gets to create black art, who gets to receive black art and how they get to receive it has been grappled with over and over, in many ways ― from Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” to the white-directed and -written “The Help” to even Jenkins’ Oscar-winning last movie, “Moonlight.” People get anxious about black pain being offered up as fodder for white spectatorship. But “Beale Street,” which is based on the James Baldwin novel and which Jenkins described as “aggressively black,” created no such tension for the director.

“If the film was engineered expressly for white people to experience black pain, then I would feel a certain kind of way,” he said. “Being the creator of the piece, I know that’s not my intent. Having read the novel, I feel like that wasn’t Mr. Baldwin’s intent. I think because of that, I don’t feel any kind of way about the experience of a shared audience experiencing the work.”