Ava Duvernay has achieved plenty of cinematic firsts, including being the first Black woman to take home Best Director honors at Sundance, the first Black woman to direct a film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and the first Black woman to helm a movie with a budget of over $100 million.
Now the acclaimed director’s latest film is taking the Venice Film Festival by storm and so impressed the audiences at the prestigious festival with her latest film Origin that she received a nine-minute standing ovation.
The first Black female director to be nominated for an Academy Award for 2014’s Selma is now the first Black female American director to participate in the 80 year-old film festival’s history.
“For Black filmmakers, we’re told that people who love films in other parts of the world don’t care about our stories and don’t care about our films. This is something that we are often told: You cannot play international film festivals, no one will come,” DuVernay said on Wednesday (September 6). “People will not come to the press conferences, people won’t come to the P&I screenings. They will not be interested in selling tickets. You might not even get into this festival, don’t apply. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told, ‘Don’t apply to Venice, you won’t get in. It won’t happen.’ And this year, something happened that hadn’t happened in eight decades before an African American woman in competition. So now that’s a door open that I trust and hope the festival will keep open.”
Origin is the adaptation of New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson’s groundbreaking book, Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents. It centers around the endurance of life-shattering tragedy which informs the author of her path to enlightenment.
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