Ava DuVernay is a sculptor of non-fiction, shaping her films into something real and yet interpretive. Her best work is art and reality all at once. Tell me you didn’t hold your breath during When They See Us—that you didn’t feel sick for those five young men. Or tell me your bones didn’t ache on that bridge in Selma. Try to convince me that 13th didn’t rattle your cage because you suddenly realized you might be part of one. Ava is brilliant at realness that doesn’t clone reality but stylizes it to show us angles we didn’t realize are there.
Origin is only different in that it is her finest work to date. A film that fills in the missing pieces of our societal woes and makes us want to shatter the mirror it holds up with equal potency. In its inception, Origin belongs to another virtuoso, Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize winner, cultural anthropologist, “interpreter of the human condition,” and historian. In 2020, she wrote a book called Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in which she shares the revelation that—beyond race, religion, or any -ism—what fuels oppression is caste. It is a thunderous book, but it is academic to its core.
When Ava took the baton—alongside leading actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (who embodies Wilkerson)—she transformed non-fiction into a lush mélange of biopic, documentary, and meditation on grief. We accompany Ellis-Taylor’s Wilkerson as she searches for a collective impetus behind the killing of Trayvon Martin, the Holocaust, and the subjugation of the Dalit people of India. At the same time, she is draped in a pall of mourning for the two most important people in her life. That duality transitions from a biopic into a dramatization of the research Wilkerson did on her way to writing Caste.
It took a clever mind to bring those genres together, to weave them into a tapestry made of an unbroken thread of history. And to make us feel the emotional pierce of the needle. In that way, Origin is also the story of Ava and her work. As its writer and director, she has crafted a beautiful veracity. Taylor-Ellis lifts the material into the rafters as though she is the first lady of an opera house and it is her aria. This film moves the crowd every time we see it. Therefore, if you’ll indulge me in alliteration, Origin is an opus worthy of ovation.
