Ava DuVernay, director of “Selma,” sat down to discuss the making of her new Netflix documentary, 13TH, during the 54th New York Film Festival. Named after the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery, “13TH” synthesizes 150 years of history in order to examine how the criminal justice system affects people of color.
13TH relies heavily on archival footage to tell its story. DuVernay and her team were tasked with not only sorting through and cutting down around 1000 hours of footage, but also balancing the preservation of the footage’s integrity, with maintaining a consistent tone and pace for the film. When prompted about the process of using archival footage, DuVernay described it as a “horrible, pride-swallowing siege of an awful process”. With so much footage, DuVernay explained that she had a hard time staying focused. “You get to talking about something, you stumble on a new idea and you just want to go down that rabbit hole.”
With such a poignant topic, it comes as no surprise that some aspects of creating the documentary were difficult on an emotional level. DuVernay described a segment in the film that is hard for her to watch, in which a black man walks down the street, repeatedly picking up his hat after people keep knocking it off. Going over the footage, however, was not the only difficult part of making this documentary.
13TH features a number of cellphone videos depicting members of the police killing African Americans, and, although she did not legally have to, DuVernay asked for permission from the families before using the clips, out of respect. “Can you imagine the last moments of your loved one in such a manner, and anyone can use it and not even ask your permission?” Contacting people who suffered these tragedies over and over again proved too much; Tera Duvernay, Ava’s sister and the film’s lead researcher, took over the position. “I couldn’t function and do that too,” Ava said, “it was so dark”.
Despite the film’s dark tone, Duvernay declares that she can’t be completely pessimistic. “I move more freely than everyone on my family before me,” she said. But improvement moves “at a snail’s pace,” she said, “and while it’s moving along at that pace, people are dying and being murdered”. However, people are not defined by their trauma. That is why the credits are about Black joy, and DuVernay fundamentally made this film in a place of hope. When asked about her thoughts on the future, DuVernay responded by saying that “change comes through the individual…I truly feel like if this [film] can change peoples ideas about what this all means—when you see Black Lives Matter and your not sure, when you see a Black person walking down the street and your not sure, when you hear the prison statistics—that you have some context for it that’s emotional, then we’re not all living in this fog of ignorance.”
