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 Using TV footage, music, and interviews with academics,
politicians and former prisoners, director Ava DuVernay portrays
African-Americans as remaining enslaved, dating back to
lynchings, the battle for civil rights, imprisonments for drug
offenses, stop and frisk laws, and the current spate of police
killings of unarmed black civilians.
The U.S. prison population rose from 357,000 in 1970 to 2.3
million in 2014, the documentary notes. While black men account
for some 6.6 percent of the U.S. population, they currently make
up 40.2 percent of the prison population.
DuVernay, best known for directing the 2014 civil rights feature
film "Selma," grew up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of
Compton, the birthplace of West Coast rap music.
"The community I grew up in, we don't think of safety when we
see the police ... So it's always been on my mind, and as I was
an African-American studies major at UCLA, I was able to put
that experience into a historical and cultural context and it
really solidified my deep, deep interest in the space and this
issue. I always knew I would make a film about it," she said.
The documentary owes its title to the 13th amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, which ended slavery in 1865. It finishes with
videos of the deaths at police hands of black men Freddie Gray,
Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Philando Castile and others over the
past three years that have given rise to the Black Lives Matter
protest movement
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"The film deconstructs the 13th amendment, breaks down all of the
repercussions, the echoes of that amendment throughout history to
the present day," said DuVernay.
The documentary received a standing ovation at the New York Film
Festival last week and has a rare 100 percent positive rating on
review aggregator Rottentomatoes.com.
It makes its debut on streaming platform Netflix on Friday, and
DuVernay hopes it will serve as a call to action.
"You now can't say, 'gosh, I didn't know that, that's horrible.' Now
you know, so what do you do about it? Do you ask your politician
about it, do you push for answers?
"Now it's out in the world and we'll see what happens," she said.
(Reporting by Reuters Television; Writing by Jill Serjeant; Editing
by Steve Orlofsky)
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