Ava DuVernay on Importance of Her Prison Doc '13th': 'Black People Should Have More Than a Steady Diet of Marvel Movies'
Heading into its 54th year, the New York Film Festival decided to do things a little differently for its 2016 edition, which runs from Friday to Oct. 16. Rather than kick off the festivities with another splashy, star-powered studio feature like The Social Network or The Walk, the festival programmers reserved the opening-night slot for the Netflix documentary The 13th. But this Netflix documentary happens to boast a star of its own: director Ava DuVernay, who has quickly established herself as one of the important African-American voices in Hollywood.
With 13th, which directly connects America’s overcrowded prison system to the nation’s legacy of racism, DuVernay uses that voice to amplify a message that couldn’t feel timelier and more vital. Released as this contentious election season enters its final month — and while images of police shootings and the accompanying civil unrest continue to play on endless loops across social media and cable news — the documentary can potentially use its perch as NYFF’s Opening Night selection to attract a wide viewership and effect real change. (13th premieres on Netflix, and in select theaters, on Oct. 7.) “I made this film from a place of hope,” DuVernay told a visibly moved audience after the press screening. “This is a generations-old problem that we allowed to happen, and it’s going to require a shift in the collective consciousness in order to unravel the deep layers of a system of oppression.”
In some ways, 13th functions as a spiritual sequel to DuVernay’s previous film, Selma, which dramatized Martin Luther King Jr.’s era-defining, authority-defying march from Selma to Montgomery. (The film received a Best Picture nomination, although DuVernay was notably — and controversially — absent from the Best Director nominees.) That march preceded President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 signing of the Voting Rights Act, one of the crowning achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, that sought to bar racial discrimination from the voting booth. But as DuVernay’s film outlines, the African-American voter disenfranchisement that King fought so hard against soon took on another form, one based around the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery and gives this documentary its title.
The amendment states that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” 13th compellingly argues that the “punishment for crime” clause has created a new class of slave labor through an exponentially increased prison popular that predominantly consists of black and Latino inmates, whose voting rights are often stripped away as part of their sentences. This process, asserts DuVernay, has been aided and abetted by a long list of conservative and even centrist politicians — a list that includes everyone from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton — who have pursued “law and order” policies that result in high rates of minority arrests and convictions. “13th started as an exploration of for-profit prisons,” DuVernay said. “I thought that was all it would be about; but we’re in the midst of a Black Lives Matter moment and that prompted up to interrogate more deeply, connecting for-profit prisons with their historical legacy. I followed my whims and curiosity in making the film.”
Those whims originally called for a different ending from the one seen in the finished film — a montage of pictures of black men, women, and children in more joyful settings than the spaces depicted in the rest of 13th. In one of the film’s earlier incarnations, DuVerney closed with a sequence where each of the subjects interviewed in the film — including such impressive names as Cory Booker, Angela Davis, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. — describes their profession. “I had these 35 people declaring who they were and what they did. When I watched the sequence, I felt like it left me off the hook; I went, ‘Oh, they’re going to fix this!’ I wanted [audiences] to leave feeling on the hook for something. So this new credit sequence is all about black joy, because black trauma is not our life. I’m uncompromising in wanting better, but I know that I move differently and more freely than anyone in my family before me.”
DuVernay emphasized that she wanted to take a no-frills approach to the film’s visual style, although the interview segments do have a deliberate aesthetic. “My thought was to put [the interviewees] in spaces that represent labor. Most of the locations feel very industrial, connecting to the idea of the labor that has been stolen from black people for centuries.” She also weighed whether or not to include footage of current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, whose campaign has stoked racial tensions around the country, resulting in confrontations that uncomfortably resemble similar scenes from the Civil Rights era. “Trump has taken this country to a place that’s going to have repercussions beyond whether he’s the president or not,” DuVernay said. “We played with taking him out, but you’ve got to show that stuff because it’s too important to be forgotten.”
And the fact that the film is widely accessible on Netflix leads DuVerney to hope that 13th won’t be forgotten as the fall movie season continues. “We all know about cinema segregation, the fact that you can’t see many of the films we love as film lovers in the inner cities, because there’s no art house movie theater there. The only theaters show whatever the studios choose, and I think black people should have more than a steady diet of Marvel movies. No disrespect to Marvel!,” said DuVernay, who came close to directing the Black Panther film currently being helmed by Ryan Coogler. “I wanted to make something that was evergreen, that would still be relevant five to 10 years from now.”
