A teaser trailer has dropped for the UK release of the new film, Yardie, which is the feature film directorial debut of Idris Elba.
The film, which premiered at Sundance last month, stars Aml Ameen and is a StudioCanal, Green Door Pictures, Sprout Pictures and BBC Films production.
It is a big-screen adaptation Victor Headley’s novel which is set in 1970s Kingston and 1980s Hackney and follows the rise of a young Jamaican in London’s drug-dealing underworld.
Yardie was the first novel by Jamaican-born British writer Headley, published in London in 1992. The novel borrows its title from a slang term originally given to occupants of housing projects.
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).