Somewhere in between shooting HBO fashion documentary The Battle of Versailles, her own TV series Queen Sugar, and the Disney feature A Wrinkle in Time, Ava Duvernay has filmed a secret documentary about systematic racism and the prison-industrial complex in America. The 13th, named after the 1865 constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, will open the New York Film Festival in September. It will be the first documentary to do so in the festival’s 53-year history, and the first film by a black woman to do so. The timely story is then slated for an October 7 release on Netflix and in theaters.
The film will reportedly include footage of the Civil Rights Movement, the Ku Klux Klan, Black Lives Matter activists, and interviews with leading political figures and scholars including Michelle Alexander, who wrote the 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Previous festival openers include The Walk and Gone Girl, the latter of which pulled in a whopping $369.3 million at the box office. Festival director Kent Jones told the New York Times that the decision to lead with The 13th is a testament to its storytelling power. “There’s no other answer besides the fact that it’s a great film,” he said. “It meets the moment head on. She’s redefining what the national conversation is, and doing it in a very powerful way.”
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Text Hannah Ongley
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