Ava DuVernay is an award-winning African-American filmmaker who in these days of riots in the United States, following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, has taken the side of the protesters and the African-American communities fighting against police violence, injustice, lack of equal opportunities and rights.
Nine years ago, Ava was a publicist. Today she is a successful filmmaker, with her groundbreaking series When They See Us Netflix which reached 23 million accounts in the first weeks after its release and received 16 Emmy Award nominations. The series tells the story of the “The Exonerated Five”.” - Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana Jr. and Korey Wise - the five young men who were wrongly convicted of the rape and assault of a woman in Central Park in 1989.
He won the director's award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for his second feature film Middle of Nowhere, becoming the first black woman to win the prize.
With his film Selma (2014) on the civil rights march of Martin Luther King Jr. about the small town of the same name, DuVernay became the first black woman to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director, and also the first black director to have her film nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture.In 2017, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary for her film 13th (2016).
The Disney children's fantasy film A Wrinkle in Time DuVernay's 2018 made her the first black woman to direct a live-action film that earned $100 million at the US box office.
Its success has not been easy: Hollywood cinema today is a predominantly white, male-dominated industry. Since the advent of American cinema, films have been directed mostly by white men, have had a predominantly white cast, and have told mostly white-centric stories, even as audiences and actors, writers, directors, and others have become more diverse. For example, while people of colour were 40% of the US population in 2016, 87% of directors were white. Women make up just over half of the population, yet 93% of directors were men in 2016.
Being a black filmmaker in Hollywood is very difficult: in fact, after receiving countless rejections, Ava stopped submitting her projects to industry tycoons and tried a different approach: in 2010, she launched a small distribution company of only two people, now called Array.
Array was to be a peer-to-peer, artistic and advocacy grassroots distribution collective focused on films by women and people of colour. With Array, DuVernay asserted that his perspective - that stories focused on people of colour needed to be told - was valid.
The Array crew has now grown to 17 people, all working together to redefine what is good and acceptable to create. Array has intentionally become a purposeful place for individuals who share Ava's principles to shape their common agenda - to create stories that focus on women and people of colour and that do not carry the burden of explaining women's stories or black art and culture in a mainstream way. In this context, they came to create new stories, grow production capacity and come together as a collective to create a market.
Also in directing A Wrinkle in Time for Disney , DuVernay demanded that those ideals apply in the production: “Don't bring me a bunch of white men,” he said. “I expect you to ... choose department heads who don't look like the majority of department heads.”.
Like any innovator in any industry, she tells the stories that are close to her heart: Selma is full of references to the director's childhood. Middle of Nowhere, set in DuVernay's hometown of Compton, California, tells the story of a woman's separation from her incarcerated husband, focusing on the structure of the lives of the women who live there.
In 2016 13th, a documentary film explores “the intersection of race, justice and mass incarceration in the United States”, and is named after the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as punishment for conviction of a crime.
DuVernay argues that slavery has been perpetuated since the end of the American Civil War, criminalising behaviour and allowing the police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leases; the suppression of African-Americans with disenfranchisement, lynchings and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weighs most heavily on minority communities; and, at the end of the 20th century, the mass incarceration of black people in the United States. It examines the prison-industrial complex by discussing how much money is made by corporations from such incarcerations.
13th has won acclaim from numerous film critics. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary at the 89th Academy Awards, and won the Primetime Emmy Award for Best Documentary or Special Nonfiction at the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards, as well as numerous other awards.
On Netflix you can find 13th Amendment: A conversation with Oprah Winfrey and Ava DuVernay, in which Oprah Winfrey talks with director Ava DuVernay about her Oscar-nominated documentary, historical cycles of oppression and the failure of the US prison system to function.
