There’s ambition, then there’s execution. Ava DuVernay’s 2023 film, Origin, grapples with a subject that has been relevant since forever: casteism. And what DuVernay has attempted to do here is something that you wouldn’t see every day: capture a global issue while telling the deeply personal story of an individual. The film follows the journey of Isabell Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote her award-winning book Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents. But it is not just some book. It also tells the story of the writer herself, who suffers as many as three tragedies, which, in a way, lays the foundation of her book as a kind of coping mechanism. Sadly, it doesn’t quite translate on the 70 mm, as Origin fails to evoke the kind of emotion it was looking for. It does have some strong moments, but most of it feels rather gimmicky...
- 3/20/2024
- by Rohitavra Majumdar
- Film Fugitives
Jon Bernthal and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in OriginPhoto: Atsushi Nishijima (Neon)
There’s a scene nearly halfway through Origin where the protagonist is advised by her confidant to simplify her new book’s sharp-but-unwieldy premise or risk losing potential readers. It reads like similar feedback given to writer-director Ava DuVernay in...
There’s a scene nearly halfway through Origin where the protagonist is advised by her confidant to simplify her new book’s sharp-but-unwieldy premise or risk losing potential readers. It reads like similar feedback given to writer-director Ava DuVernay in...
- 12/8/2023
- by Courtney Howard
- avclub.com
In Ava DuVernay’s latest film, Origin, which held its U.S. premiere at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville on Friday, the filmmaker wrestles with a lot of big ideas. For the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker behind Selma, 13th and When They See Us, tackling big questions about race, class and history is nothing new — but for her latest feature, she admits she had to break a lot of established filmmaking rules to bring the story of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson to the screen.
Taking inspiration from Wilkerson’s acclaimed 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, DuVernay’s film is partly a portrait of Wilkerson — played in the film by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who recently earned a Gotham Award nom for her role in the film — as she embarks on an intellectual journey across time and place to connect how social hierarchies in distinctly different cultures across the globe are connected,...
Taking inspiration from Wilkerson’s acclaimed 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, DuVernay’s film is partly a portrait of Wilkerson — played in the film by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who recently earned a Gotham Award nom for her role in the film — as she embarks on an intellectual journey across time and place to connect how social hierarchies in distinctly different cultures across the globe are connected,...
- 10/30/2023
- by Tyler Coates
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Ava DuVernay’s return to feature filmmaking doubles as a thematic homecoming. Origin, loosely adapted from Isabel Wilkerson’s tome Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, is, at its core, a deeply sincere story of love and grief.
DuVernay’s interest in animating the inner lives of Black women stretches back to her feature debut, I Will Follow, in which she explored the contours of a young woman’s heartache after the death of her aunt. She built on it with Middle of Nowhere, a remarkable second feature about a nurse confronting her relationship with her incarcerated husband. And although Selma is about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the film complicates Coretta (Carmen Ejogo), positioning her as King’s strategic co-conspirator instead of just a dutiful wife. In all of these films, DuVernay centers the emotional landscape of Black women, reflecting on how interpersonal and structural constrictions shape their behaviors.
DuVernay’s interest in animating the inner lives of Black women stretches back to her feature debut, I Will Follow, in which she explored the contours of a young woman’s heartache after the death of her aunt. She built on it with Middle of Nowhere, a remarkable second feature about a nurse confronting her relationship with her incarcerated husband. And although Selma is about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the film complicates Coretta (Carmen Ejogo), positioning her as King’s strategic co-conspirator instead of just a dutiful wife. In all of these films, DuVernay centers the emotional landscape of Black women, reflecting on how interpersonal and structural constrictions shape their behaviors.
- 9/6/2023
- by Lovia Gyarkye
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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