THE 13TH Trailer: Ava DuVernay Explores The Nation's Prison System in New Documentary

As a black female filmmaker in Hollywood, Ava DuVernay isn't afraid to tackle complex societal issues about race, gender, and politics in her work. She humanized Martin Luther King, Jr. in her terrific 2014 film Selma, and while she's about to direct a big studio movie for Disney (A Wrinkle in Time), before that, we'll see a new documentary project from her called The 13th.

The movie, which opens the New York Film Festival later this week and hits Netflix on October 7th, dives into America's prison system and a culture which has allowed for black people to be locked up for years, oftentimes unjustly. It's a hot-button topic, but one that definitely deserves some attention and is important for everyone to learn about, even if you don't agree with her specific stance here. Check out the trailer below.

The title of Ava DuVernay’s extraordinary and galvanizing documentary 13TH refers to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” The progression from that second qualifying clause to the horrors of mass criminalization and the sprawling American prison industry is laid out by DuVernay with bracing lucidity. With a potent mixture of archival footage and testimony from a dazzling array of activists, politicians, historians, and formerly incarcerated women and men, DuVernay creates a work of grand historical synthesis.

The title of Ava DuVernay's extraordinary and galvanizing documentary 13TH refers to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States."

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