.png)
2 months ago
69 ARTICLE AD
Ava DuVernay has slammed Donald Trump’s re-election as a U.S. president, in spite of a criminal charges against him, saying that black people arrested on smaller crimes land years of jail time.
DuVernay was speaking in a conversation event at the Marrakech film festival, moderated by Rosalie Varda, daughter of late iconic filmmaker Agnès Varda, who is friend of the Selma, 13th and A Wrinkle in Time director and producer.
The subject of Trump’s re-election arose in a discussion on her Netflix-backed 2016 documentary 13th, exploring racial injustice in the U.S. penal system, and the fact its prisons are disproportionately filled with African-Americans.
“My country is run by criminals, but that criminality is seen as completely different. That a black kid on the corner that might buy marijuana… is [in] prison for years, and the criminals get re-elected,” she said.
“The idea of who is criminal and what and who is deciding who is right and who’s wrong was something that I wanted to address, but I really thought that it would sit on the back page of Netflix, and no-one would see it when it first debuted, but then it shot to number one in multiple countries,” she said.
“I think it really says something about where we are and the way that we have much more in common when it comes to prejudice and the hierarchy of people in different societies around the world.”
In a wide-ranging conversation, DuVernay also about talked her childhood in Compton and the light bulb moment while working as a publicist on the set of Michael Mann’s Collateral, when she decided she want to be director.
“I was watching Michael Mann direct Tom Cruise and Javier Bardem in a scene, and I thought, I want to do what he’s doing. I want to be Michael Mann,” she said.
“And on this set, all I remember is that Michael Mann was trying to explain something, not to an actor, but to someone else. And I thought in my head, ‘He should say it like this. They don’t understand what he’s saying. If he just said that they’d understand it,” she recounted.
DuVernay also dived into on her latest film Origin, based on the life of Isabel Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as she writes the book ‘Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents’ exploring caste systems and racial prejudice worldwide.
The feature world premiered to fanfare in Venice in 2023, but failed to ignite the box office in the U.S., where it was distributed by Neon, or find wide international distribution.
“This film is a complicated film for me,” said DuVernay, who said she hoped the work would find an audience and resonance further down the line.
“There’s a filmmaker that I know, Ed Zwick, who said a film success isn’t judged by box office, or reviews, it’s just by time. And I hope that time will be kind to this film, because the film has had a challenging road to finding an audience for a number of reasons.”
DuVernay said the production had suffered from “lackluster distribution” and was also challenging to market because of the tough subject matter at a tense time geopolitically.
“The film came out right at the beginning of the the tragedy in Palestine and the film talks about hierarchies, oppressed people, Holocaust, genocide, racism, Islamophobia. It talks about a lot of subjects that was uncomfortable for people to face,” she said.
“It’s one of the number of reasons why the film has been little seen, never had global distribution… it hurts to make something and put all your love into it, and it just can’t quite reach the audience. But I have to believe in time, and hopefully this film will, will will be found later.
