Dear Readers,
At the conclusion of the world premiere of Ava DuVernay's sweeping, innovative and visionary new film, Origin, at the Venice International Film Festival, the audience stood for a resounding nine-minute ovation. At the end of my private screening of the film before its release this month, I wept — reeling from the emotional impact of Ava’s masterful storytelling and awed by the power of the ideas put forward in the narrative source for the film, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”
The film follows the story of the brilliant Isabel Wilkerson as she traveled the world researching her 2020 book, which was an exploration of her bold and insightful thesis that “beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate.” By exposing the interrelatedness of the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, she presents an “eye-opening story of people and history.”
As Wilkerson explained in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, “Caste is the term that is more precise [than race]; it is more comprehensive, and it gets at the underlying infrastructure that often we cannot see, but that is there undergirding much of the inequality and injustices and disparities that we live with in this country.”
“People told me this was an unadaptable book, so the logical thing to do is to try and adapt it.”
Ava DuVernay read the book three times, and as she told me in our TEDWomen interview in October, she accepted the challenge to turn a book that everybody told her was unadaptable into a film that she knew every Hollywood studio would probably turn down. But Wilkerson's idea that “so much of our oppression is linked and that if we embrace the commonalities of our challenges… there's a way forward, a way to combat some of our social ills,” resonated with DuVernay and inspired her to attempt what many told her was impossible.
The result is Origin, a breathtaking film that “explores the mystery of history, the wonders of romance, and a fight for the future of us all.”
You can watch my entire conversation with Ava DuVernay which launches today on TED.com to learn more about how she pulled together funding, resisted the recommendations to make it a documentary and found a powerful way to adapt Wilkerson’s thesis into a narrative movie that is brilliantly acted and innovatively produced with philanthropic funding.
DuVernay has succeeded in making a groundbreaking and transcendent film that will compel anyone who sees it — and you MUST see it — to rethink not only our view of the world and our interconnected beliefs and biases, but to reconsider our place in the systems that perpetuate injustice.
In a recent interview on The View, DuVernay explained why she rushed to make this film for release before this year’s US election. Origin presents “ideas about the ways in which we organize ourselves, the ways in which we think about ourselves and our divisions,” she said. “Everyone is in their own corners and not speaking to each other. I was hoping that this film could spark a conversation that we should be having right now.”
But she doesn’t just want voters to watch it. She also hopes that every 16 year old in America sees the film. She even set up a crowdfunding website where you can “gift” tickets to young people, as well as friends and family. For $16, you can give a young person a free ticket to the film.
Why? Because, as she observed, understanding earlier the origins of the beliefs that divide and denigrate and destroy is important if we are ever to live in a world free of the idea that one race, one class, one origin, or one religion is superior to another.
Origin, like its source material, the monumental must-read book, Caste, compels us to envision such a world and do our part to make it a new reality.
Onward!
- Pat
