‘Untraditional Ideas’: Filmmaker Ava DuVernay Explores Caste and Loss in Film ‘Origin’ at Harvard IOP Forum

Screenwriter Ava DuVernay spoke about her latest film “Origin,” which is based on the life of Isabel Wilkerson as she wrote her award-winning book “Caste,” at a Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics Forum event on Wednesday evening.

Also featuring Harvard Kennedy School professor Khalil G. Muhammad, the discussion delved into the creation of the film and how it related to the social hierarchies Wilkerson explores in “Caste.” In particular, “Origin” connects American history regarding race, the genocide of Jews in Nazi Germany, and the caste system in India.

The forum marked the third in a speaker series hosted by the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project, which Muhammad described in a Thursday interview with The Crimson as “a research based project that examines policies and practices in organizations that help to institutionalize racial equity and anti-racism where those are goals of organizations.”

As the first Black woman to be nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Director, DuVernay has established herself in Hollywood through her works including “Selma”, “A Wrinkle in Time”, and “When They See Us”. In 2011, she established ARRAY, an independent distribution company.

During the event, DuVernay explained her approach to tackling the complex ideas of caste and creating the film outside of the moments in history she chose to include.

DuVernay said she chose to center the film on Wilkerson and her process, saying, “from a character perspective, as a writer and director, I have to be motivated by human emotions.”

“From one scene to another, what is she doing? What does she want? So, that can’t be caste, right? That needs to be the interiority of the character,” she said.

According to DuVernay, Wilkerson was grappling with recent losses in her family as she wrote “Caste,” paralleling DuVernay’s own experiences during the creation of “Origin.”

“Those two stories run side by side: her losses, as we get to love the people that she loved and lose them as she loses them, and what she’s finding and gaining during that time as well with a trio of other love stories that she’s investigating and exploring and all of those collide, and all of those make their way into the book somehow,” DuVernay said.

In an interview with the Crimson Thursday morning, DuVernay described how, in blurring the lines between “traditional styles,” she had to opt out of making the film at a studio to avoid the influences of corporate interests.

“This is a film that is a drama that spans seven different time periods, four hundred years of history, zigzags from contemporary moments to historical moments with a Black woman protagonist,” she said. “Just in that alone it is untraditional, so why not apply untraditional ideas to the making of it?”

During the forum, DuVernay said her film’s “historical pieces would sit side by side with the contemporary pieces.”

“It animates the history in a way that reminds us that it’s never far behind us and that it is a part of our present and our future,” she said.

DuVernay said that despite the heavy topics they reckoned with, her works were stories of “triumph.”

“We are walking manifestations of whatever we are feeling inside, and it comes out in every conversation, in every relationship, in every work project,” she said. “That’s part of what I was trying to illustrate and chronicle.”

In the interview, DuVernay also discussed the institutional changes that must be made in the film industry. One example she gave was “going beyond semantics” — including the use of buzzwords like “diversity and inclusion,” which are “obscuring the fact that no substantive work is being done.”

“More kinds of people should be doing more kinds of things within our industry,” she said. “If we invested in that, and actually were actionable and intentional about it, that’s what brings real change, not the words we decide to use.”