Ava DuVernay Makes Dig At Donald Trump’s Re-Election; Dives Into Limited ‘Origin’ Release: “This Is A Difficult Film For Me” – Marrakech Film Festival

Melanie Goodfellow
·5-min read

Ava DuVernay has slammed Donald Trump’s re-election as U.S. president, in spite of a criminal charges against him, saying that black people arrested on smaller crimes land years of jail time.

She 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.

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The subject of Trump’s re-election arose in a discussion on DuVernay’s 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.

“The idea of mass incarceration of criminality, and how black and brown people in certain parts of the world are considered inherently criminal, that’s what it is about. It’s more about the idea of why do we believe some people have a criminal tendency and others don’t,” said DuVernay.

“My country is run by criminals, but that criminality is seen as completely different than a black kid on the corner who might buy, sell marijuana,” she continued to applause. “The black kid is in prison for years, while criminals are elected and make millions of dollars and sell electric cars.

At the time of his re-election in November, Trump was facing two separate federal criminal cases of illegally retaining  classified documents and attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Both cases were dismissed “without prejudice”, last week in a move that leaves open the possibility that charges can be refiled after Trump finishes his second term as president.

Trump was also awaiting sentencing for his criminal conviction in the state of New York, over his Stormy Daniels payment, but this also been indefinitely delayed.

“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 talked with affection about her childhood in the southern Los Angeles city of 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 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’s 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 released in the U.S. on December 10, 2023, two months after the October 7 Hamas attacks which killed more than 1,200 people. Israel’s retaliatory military action in Gaza has since resulted in the deaths of more than 44,400 people, according to figures released by the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

“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 were 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 be found later.”

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