Ava DuVernay’s Origin teaser trailer is here to stir your emotions before its world premiere tomorrow at the Venice Film Festival. Breaking ground as the first African-American woman director in competition in Venice Film Festival’s eighty-year history, DuVernay wrote, produced, and directed Origin, which is inspired by the remarkable life and work of Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson as she pens her seminal book, Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents. NEON recently acquired the worldwide rights to Origin, with a gala screening happening at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“While grappling with tremendous personal tragedy, Isabel sets herself on a path of global investigation and discovery,” reads the film’s official press release. “Despite the colossal scope of her project, she finds beauty and bravery while crafting one of the defining American books of our time.”
Aunjanue Ellis Taylor (King Richard, Lovecraft Country) leads the cast, with Jon Bernthal (The Bear, The Punisher), Vera Farmiga (Bates Motel, Orphan), Audra McDonald (Private Practice, Beauty and the Beast), Niecy Nash-Betts (Claws, Never Have I Ever), Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation, The Last of Us), and Blair Underwood (Deep Impact, Rules of Engagement).
NEON CEO and Founder Tom Quinn said: “I’ve known Ava for a long time, and my love and admiration for her and her work goes back further, even before Middle of Nowhere. I’m truly humbled that it is this movie which has finally brought us together. She has always been a gifted storyteller, and her mastery of her craft shines through in this deeply personal and inspired adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s book and dramatization of her remarkable life. Origin proves once again that Ava remains one of the most groundbreaking and essential filmmakers of her generation.”
Here’s a synopsis for Wilkerson’s novel via Amazon:
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions toward hope in our common humanity.
Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.
In the Origin teaser trailer, DuVernay recreates Wilkerson’s stirring novel with an intense atmosphere, soulful cinematography, and a moment with Aunjanue Ellis Taylor that made me catch my breath. With the film premiering tomorrow at the Venice Film Festival, we won’t have to wait long with initial thoughts about DuVernay’s latest project.