Tags: blog, film, drama, documentary, 2024, recommended

Author: KickingK

Date: Monday April 08th, 2024

Ava DuVernay in magnificent form adapting a work of non-fiction.

Based on the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson, Ava DuVernay has taken a highly imaginative and passion fuelled approach to its adaptation. Instead of a straight forward documentary we have a story built around Wilkerson’s process for writing the book. The books central arguments explained through conversations with people, both in her personal life and academics she meets through her research.

Then, peppered throughout this narrative, are dramatisations of events from some of the key research texts she uses to pull together her thesis.

The decision DuVernay is making here is to replace the logic and facts that books can densely pack in with the emotive force that films can provide. Scenes from America’s history of slavery are woven together with scene’s from Nazi Germany, and later India, that don’t so much argue that they’re from the same connective tissue but make you feel this truth.

We’ve all lost count of the number of dramatisations of Nazi Germany that we’ve seen on screen. But rarely do these scenes drip with so much disdain and disgust as they do in DuVernay’s work here. The brief scenes on a slave ship are nightmare fuel. If DuVernay ever decides to turn her hand to making horror movies we are all in trouble.

If I can nit-pick slightly, out of all the areas that the film deals with, India is the one I’m least familiar with and it’s also the area the film spends the least time with. I wanted to learn more. And I also wanted to learn more about why this system exists, who benefits from it and why it persists.

But then I suppose I can go and read the book for that.

Ultimately this is a profoundly moving, human and even hopeful film. Masterful stuff.