13TH – Review by MaryAnn Johanson
Ava DuVernay’s incisive and shocking documentary 13th hit like a body blow when she first unveiled it in the autumn 2016 film festivals. (The very existence of the project came to light only when the New York Film Festival announced in July that year that this movie would open its program in September; I first saw it that October at London Film Festival.) Donald Trump had not yet been “elected” President of the United States, but already, the shock of him ascending to the status of Republican nominee was unsettling. Many Americans were already terrified of what his rise boded for the future on numerous fronts, not least the open racism of American society, which would surely only get, seemingly impossibly, even worse.
Fast forward to *checks watch* now, and this is a brutal and necessary watch. A virus pandemic is disproportionately impacting people of color, and then comes yet more homicidal police violence against Black Americans: George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are but the latest in a very long line, many of whom have in recent years had their abuse and deaths caught on smartphone video and shared online for all to see in ways that hadn’t previously been as visible or obvious, at least to white Americans. There have been lots of protests over similar deaths of Black Americans before — the shooting of Michael Brown by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and the unrest that followed, seems to have been the prompt for DuVernay to make 13th, in fact. Continue reading…
EDITOR’S NOTE: 13th is AWFJ’s Movie of the Week for January 20, 2017
