Oscar-nominated director and visionary Ava DuVernay is opening up about the personal connection she shares in her upcoming film, “Origin.”
The forthcoming film stars Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as real-life, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson as she ventures to pen her 2020 best-selling nonfiction work “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” The book is an exploratory look at the framework of the “unspoken caste system that has shaped America” and how it’s shaped civilizations both here and abroad from its inception until now.
Throughout the film, we follow Wilkerson’s journey of love and loss as she ventures to write “Caste,” a book that rose to top of the charts one week before the 2020 election and is now banned in certain states today.
Throughout the process of writing the book, Wilkerson deals with grief on several fronts — something DuVernay revealed that she, too, could unfortunately relate to.
“There’s a point in the film where Isabel loses people who are close to her. I created a sequence where a bit of magic comes into the movie in an unexpected way and you see the way Isabel feels when she’s grieving. The way I designed that was through my own experience of grief,” DuVernay told PEOPLE.
She later added:
“I felt like I was in a dark void. I felt like I couldn’t find my way out and I remember feeling that if leaves fell on me and just covered me and no one knew I was here, that would be okay because he wasn’t here. That was part of my journey through grief that I shared in the film, which was quite personal.”
As previously reported by The Root, Origin stars a stacked cast which consists of Ellis-Taylor; Niecy Nash-Betts; Audra McDonald; Blair Underwood; and Myles Frost, and more.
The film helped DuVernay make history back in July 2023 when it was announced as an Official Selection in the 80th Venice International Film Festival in September, a first for a Black woman ever. It also received a nine-minute standing ovation following its premiere.
“Origin” hits theaters Jan. 19.