DuVernay doesn’t let Hillary Clinton off the hook either as she appears in the film while she was the First Lady in 1996 referring to minority youth as “super predators.”Īva DuVernay’s ’13th’ Documentary Will Spark A Necessary Conversation About Mass…Īesthetically, 13th proves less is more with many of the interviews having been conducted in abandoned buildings with exposed brick to depict labor. The young men, who were no older than 16 at the time, were all later exonerated due to DNA evidence. It’s the context of them being public figures who have touched this issues over their time in the public eye,” DuVernay said during a roundtable interview following the film’s screening at the New York Film Festival.įootage of Trump calling for the death of the Central Park Five, a group of black and brown teens accused of the brutal 1989 rape and beating of a Central Park jogger is placed in the film. “I think what’s interesting in the doc is that the way in which they appear is not in the context of them being candidates. The film then historically traces the early mentality placed around African-Americans as criminals beginning with the 1915 film release of Birth of A Nation, which doubled as a glorified PSA for the Klu Klux Klan, all the way through the Civil Rights movement to 2016.Īt the time of this story, 13 days passed since DuVernay finished the documentary. Although she says it was never her intention to have the doc be released so close to the presidential election, the Queen Sugar director also doesn’t shy away from placing both candidates in the film in less than flattering ways.
With the outlaw of slavery, the south was financially bankrupt and to get out of the red, police began arresting newly freed slaves for petty crimes and forced them to work.
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Cory Booker, Professor Jelani Cobb, former New York Mayor David Dinkins and others, DuVernay exposes the link between mass incarceration and free black labor in America. According to statistics, America makes up just 5 percent of the world’s population but has more than 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, and with the help of activist Angela Davis, author Michelle Alexander, Sen. 7) a film that masterfully connects the dots between the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery all the way to the modern day big business of mass incarceration. The Selma director teamed up with Netflix to create 13th, (out Oct.