BREAKING THE CHAIN
Director Ava DuVernay casts a sharp eye on caste systems
WHEN TORONTO’S TIFF Bell Lightbox opened the Viola Desmond Cinema in fall 2023, they invited Ava DuVernay to christen the screen with her new film Origin.
DuVernay is the groundbreaking writer and director behind the Emmywinning limited series When
They See Us (2019). She tells stories about Black love, resilience, activism and community. Her 2014 drama about Martin Luther King,
Jr., Selma, made her the first Black woman to helm a best picture nominee at the Oscars. DuVernay’s an inspiring choice to honour Desmond, the Black Canadian civil rights icon arrested in 1946 at the Roseland Theatre in Nova Scotia for defying its segregation rules, sitting firm in the whites-only orchestra section instead of retreating to the balcony. “We can make change in a cinema,” DuVernay, glowing in a bright red jumpsuit, told the audience before the
Origin screening, “whether it’s protesting in a seat or whether it’s protesting on film or whether it’s protesting by just watching it and changing the way you think about a thing.”
Desmond’s rousing story – worth remembering during Black History Month – would have fit snugly in DuVernay’s
Origin, a boldly ambitious and stubbornly expansive mosaic scrolling through intimate and historical accounts from people confronting antiBlack racism, antisemitism and class discrimination. DuVernay adapted Origin from Isabel Wilkerson’s highly celebrated Caste: The Origins
of Our Discontents, a nonfiction book full of anecdotes and ideas that would have lent itself more easily to a talking-head documentary – like DuVernay’s take on the prison industrial complex in 2016 Oscar-nominated 13th.
But DuVernay opted instead to dramatize Wilkerson’s journey when writing the challenging book, positioning the author as our guide and emotional anchor.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, the star of CBC’s 2015 adaptation of Lawrence Hill’s Book of
Negroes, and who was Oscarnominated for her role in
King Richard (2021), gives a stirring performance as Wilkerson – who navigates personal losses and fights to hold on to love while travelling from the southern states to Germany and as far east as India. Wilkerson and DuVernay explore the connective tissue between slavery, the Holocaust and the Indian caste system, exposing the shared economic models behind isolated human injustices. They’re demystifying racism and trying to build empathy across communities. “We’re not seeking agreement on the ideas,” DuVernay said in an empowering entreaty to the audience at the Viola Desmond Cinema. “We’re seeking engagement.”