One of the most ambitious films to come out of the US in a long time, Ava DuVernay’s Origin investigates the underpinnings of oppression throughout different cultures and centuries, drawing connections between racism, slavery, the Holocaust, and the caste system in India. It’s the thesis of Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, and Wilkerson is the protagonist here, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. Heady stuff, but realized with authority and conviction.
Ava DuVernay’s Origin is as audacious as it is ambitious. At its core, it concerns an intellectual argument about history and hierarchies of power, but it’s also about the fraught process of making this argument. It’s a daunting conceit that DuVernay has shaped into an eventful narrative that is, by turns, specific and far-ranging, diagnostic and aspirational. It is a great big swing about taking a great big swing, and while the film is more persuasive as a drama than the argument it relays, few American movies this year reach so high so boldly.
Manohla Dargis, New York Times
Meditative, poetic, and nearly unfaltering… the character of a truly great film isn’t found in its perfection. Rather it arises from how the narrative moves, challenges, and hugs the heart. Rich in thought, Origin is a dense, forceful masterwork, and, quite simply, the most radical film of DuVernay’s career.
Robert Daniels, rogerebert.com
What this captivating, complicated, and oft-compelling movie gives you is a biopic not of a writer but of a book, from inspiration to publication.
David Fear, Rolling Stone
Ava DuVernay
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash, Emily Yancy, Finn Wittrock
USA
2023
In English and German
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits
Screenwriter
Ava DuVernay
Cinematography
Matthew Lloyd
Editor
Spencer Averick
Original Music
Kris Bowers
Also Playing
Fairy Creek
Considered the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, the Fairy Creek blockade led to more than 1200 arrests. What Jen Muranetz's film gives us is the story from the front line from the activists' point of view (often, from the treetops).
Super Happy Forever
This beguiling film depicts a man’s return to the Japanese seaside town where he met his now-deceased wife five years earlier. He tries to relive the past, and in the film's final section -- a flashback to 2018 -- the audience is afforded that privilege.
Inedia
Liz Cairns makes a mesmerizing feature debut that sees a young woman suffering from mysterious food allergies join a remote island community practicing alternative healing methods. She soon realizes that not everything is as it seems.
Drop Dead City
New York, 1975. The city is minutes away from bankruptcy and President Gerald Ford wants no part of it. Sanitation workers are on strike and cops are telling tourists it's not safe to visit. The town is going up in flames and they can't pay the firemen.