On the eve of the US presidential election, Ava DuVernay is in Geneva as the guest of honor at the 13th edition of the Geneva International Film Festival (GIFF). She has presented several of her films and series, including her latest work, Origin, which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2023 but remains unreleased in France – like her first two feature films. Now independent from studio oversight, the director of Selma (2014) and When They See Us self-produced Origin, a film of wild ambition. The drama is adapted from Isabel Wilkerson's best-selling nonfiction book Caste, published in 2020, which examines the history of racism in the US, illuminated by the Indian caste system and the pseudo-legal framework set up by the Nazis in Germany.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
I have a lot of anxiety, but I'm also hopeful. It is a very nerve-wracking time. I think so many people have worked very hard to try to share the idea that voting is important and that there is a stark contrast between the candidates in terms of our best interests. We shall see. I'm nervous.
We've already seen the examples. We've seen what's happened with The Apprentice [Ali Abbasi's film about Donald Trump's youth, which had trouble finding a distributor despite its success at its Cannes screening] or certain films that are interested in showing us Palestinian perspectives. We've seen certain media outlets restricting their coverage of certain topics. If Trump is elected, this will all increase and the voices of artists will be made more fragile and have to be much more rigorous in the way that we make our work and try to reach people. It will be harder.
The idea of caste is simple enough to understand. It speaks to a hierarchy of human beings; the ways in which we decide who is at the top of the food chain. Immigrants, women, black and queer people are considered less than. Right now, we have a candidate who's very clearly said he intends to solidify and codify these caste rules into law that would rest on the idea that some people are better than others, which is inherently opposite to the American experiment. We know that America has never fully lived up to its promises, but the promise is still there. This candidate, Trump, says he doesn't care about the promise, he only cares about himself.
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