Last week at the Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF), director Ava DuVernay was recognized with the Spirit of Independence honor.
DuVernay, who directed “Selma,” and became the first African-American woman to earn a Best Director nomination at the Golden Globes, co-founded ARRAY, a distribution company that focuses on inclusive storytelling.
As The Hollywood Reporter described, DuVernay stressed the importance of inclusion in her speech at the event, saying, “All of us should be able to see ourselves” in film. She went on to add, “You’re starting to get into a space where we get to see something we have not seen, which are black filmmakers with a hearty amount of resources,” but that, unfortunately, “we make these projects within a system that is not built to support various voices. It’s not built to support them, to nourish them, to amplify them. When something does break through, it has to start all over again.”
Which is where ARRAY comes in — specifically when it comes to getting these films in front of audiences that yearn to see themselves on screen. DuVernay noted, for example, that there was no way to see “Selma” actually in Selma, Alabama or to see “Straight Outta Compton” in Compton itself.
“It’s not just the fact that a film can do well,” she said. “It’s the fact that there’s community around it, conversation around it, that a film can push a national moment forward, can be a piece of art. All the things that surround films of color seem to be a surprise. It really is just a selective amnesia because it’s not like it hasn’t happened before.”
DuVernay is currently working on Disney’s adaptation of “A Wrinkle in Time.” “Queen Sugar,” her TV series for Oprah’s OWN Network, began shooting earlier this year.
