Lifestyle
With 'Origin,' Ava DuVernay illuminates America's racial caste system
Ava DuVernay describes her new movie Origin, which is based on Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, as “a film about a woman in pursuit of an idea.”
Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Academy Museum
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Ava DuVernay describes her new movie Origin, which is based on Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, as “a film about a woman in pursuit of an idea.”
Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Academy Museum
When filmmaker Ava DuVernay first read Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, she was so stunned, she reread it twice. The bestselling book draws a line between India’s caste system, the hierarchies of Nazi Germany and the historic subjugation of Black people in the United States.
“It took me a really long time to wrap my mind around the idea that there’s something underneath racism that’s called caste,” DuVernay says. “It doesn’t mean racism doesn’t exist. It means the foundation, the root, the origin, underneath is the very simple premise — someone has to be better than someone else.”
DuVernay was warned that Caste was too complex to adapt into a film but with each reading she felt a story emerge more clearly. Her new movie, Origin, centers on Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as she explores how understanding the caste system can deepen our understanding of what Black people experience in America. DuVernay describes it as “a film about a woman in pursuit of an idea.”
The movie opens with a portrayal of the 2012 killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman. DuVernay says Wilkerson cited Zimmerman’s acquittal as the impetus behind the ideas she would write about in Caste.
“I remember when [Wilkerson] was sharing that with me, I thought, ‘Oh, wow, could [the film] open on that? Could the spark that sparked her spark the film?’” DuVernay says. “Trying to stay close to and honor her process, her life, her genius — I wanted to start where she started.”
DuVernay’s previous films include the historical drama Selma, about Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., and 13th, an Oscar-nominated documentary about mass incarceration. Her 2019 Netflix drama series, When They See Us, tells the story of the five young men who were falsely convicted in the 1989 Central Park jogger case.
DuVernay hopes that by releasing Origin in 2024 — an election year — the film will contribute to the country’s ongoing conversation about race and power.
“In order to do that, I believe we need new language. We need to become fluent in concepts and constructs that we currently are not,” she says. “And so it was very important to me that this film be made … and that it reached people while folks were considering the future of our country.”
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Caste author Isabel Wilkerson in Origin.
Atsushi Nishijima/Neon
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Atsushi Nishijima/Neon
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Caste author Isabel Wilkerson in Origin.
Atsushi Nishijima/Neon
Interview highlights
On reading Caste, and learning how Nazis were influenced and inspired by American racism
I’m an African American studies major, English major, UCLA. Read quite a bit – had not come across that bit of information that Nazis had been influenced by the blueprints of the American South segregation policies. That actually they had sent scholars and people to study it, to bring it back. So when I read it in her book, it was fascinating to me. But I had to go look at that stuff myself and read it myself.
It’s not widely known. And so there’s certainly scholarship out there other than Isabel Wilkerson’s that shares that information, but none that I’d ever heard of. So when I’m sitting there and I’m reading the actual notes, the actual transcriptions, the actual letters, it’s astounding. It’s very matter of fact. And in some spaces, the Germans are shocked and surprised and appalled by some of the things that were done in America and said, “That’s taking it a little too far.” … Really shocking. But certainly that’s a part of the book, and this is what I basically did is, all of the parts in the book where my jaw dropped, I put that in the movie.
The book burning scene in Origin was filmed in a square in Berlin in which the Nazis burned books in 1933.
Atsushi Nishijima/Neon
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Atsushi Nishijima/Neon
On filming a Nazi book burning scene in Germany
This was one of the sequences that I’m the most proud of. This film was made completely outside of the studio system. So it was made independently. And it was made by a small Black-woman-owned, Black-people-run company. It was me and my producing partner, Paul Garnes, and that was it. … And we found ourselves as two African American independent producers in Germany asking the city of Berlin to allow us to photograph and film a recreation of a book burning on the actual site where it happened. That was our request. And we got a “yes.”
So we shot this scene on Bebelplatz, and this is a square in which there is an actual monument to this book burning. And the monument is called the Empty Library, where you can look down into the ground. There’s a hole in the ground, a square in the ground, where you look down into rows and rows of white empty bookshelves to commemorate and symbolize the books that were burned. And so we recreated the whole book burning on that plaza, to stand there on that cobblestone and to know that that had happened in that place and that I was able to, with my comrades, tell the story to a modern audience so that that moment is not forgotten, and that moment is connected to experiences that we are having right now where we are — wherever in the world you are — the idea that ideas and imagination is at risk, the idea that books are dangerous, the idea that we can forget about our past lives by just taking them off the shelves.
On filming a scene in India with a Dalit man whose job requires him to remove human waste from public latrines by hand
This scene was one that was shocking to me, and learning about the fact that there are people to this day whose profession is that of manual scavenging. … I wanted to show and share what that looks like and what it takes for a human being to be required — expected — to degrade themselves to perform that service, just to eat, just to exist. …
And with these particular men, I wanted to find people who actually did that job. So what you are watching are men – that is what they do. That is how they live. And so I went to an advocacy group, and they had two men who were willing to perform the act on camera. … And of course, I’m not having any human being get in excrement. We created what was needed for the scene with oatmeal and food coloring. … I came to them and they came over to the set area and through a translator, I was describing what it was, and the man … looked at me and he said through the translator, “I think we should do it for real.” And his point was, people must know what is happening. Will this look real? They have to know. They need to see the truth, is what he was saying. And I promised him. And so it took a little convincing to have him go into the safe set.
On changing hierarchical language on the film set
[My cinematographer, Matt Lloyd, pointed out] when [you] look at a film set and a crew, there’s a hierarchy embedded in the very names in which we call each other by our titles, by our position titles. And we have A-cam and we have a B-cam … we have basically junior people and they’re all called these things. So as they come to the table, they’re already defined and they’re already told at that circular table who’s important. And so we try to break those down. And [our cinematographer] did an incredible job in his department of renaming everything. There was no first camera and second camera. There was an “east camera” and a “west camera.” And there were lots of little ways that we just tried to address and play with and push against this idea of caste, simply in the idea of how do we organize ourselves.
On awards season and if she cares about winning
I’m grappling with my own shame in the wanting, and I’m disappointed in myself that I am feeling that the film is not achieving those industry benchmarks. It is happening because of forces outside of my control. … It’s somewhat alarming to me … that it has hurt and it has surprised me how much I am hurt by the fact that Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is not being recognized for that work. It breaks my heart. I feel that she should have every flower. This is how I feel for David Oyelowo and Selma. I felt like, what? Why? And as I’ve moved through the industry, I understand the why, but it doesn’t make it any [easier]. And so it really makes me lean more into the independence, more into, ‘What matters, Ava?’ What matters is there’s not a screening that I have for this film and a Q&A that I have for this film where someone does not walk up to me, lock eyes with me, touch my hand and tell me what it meant. Tell me what they got from it. Tell me what the hell they felt like. Nothing else matters.
On being a Black woman, and rising outside of her caste because of professional success
Having read the book many times, studied the book, made the film about the book, my understanding of it is this: While you and I may be sitting here and we might be successful in our careers, what it has taken for us to be in these spaces is a different trajectory than what has taken what our white male counterparts have gone through to be in their spaces. In addition to that, outside of this space, when we’re walking down the street, where we’re in the department store, when we’re in various spaces where our scholarship or careers or intellect is unknown, and we are seen only by our outward facing traits — it doesn’t matter, and we are not on the same footing. And that’s the way this society functions. And so that’s part of what her book, I believe, asked me as a reader to think about, is to really drill down into it and not allow ideas about it to kind of sit inside of soundbites and easy questions. But this is really insidious stuff that affects us all. And it’s an invitation to address it, explore it, think about it.
Lauren Krenzel and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
Fireworks, by Matthew Burgess and illustrated by Cátia Chien has won the Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children, and All the Blues in the Sky, written by Renée Watson has been awarded the Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature.
Clarion Books; Bloomsbury Children’s Books
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Clarion Books; Bloomsbury Children’s Books
The best books for children and young adults were awarded the country’s top honors by the American Library Association on Monday.
Illustrator Cátia Chien and author Matthew Burgess took home the Caldecott Medal for the book Fireworks. The Caldecott is given annually to the most distinguished American picture book for children. Fireworks follows two young siblings as they eagerly await the start of a July 4th fireworks show. Paired with Chien’s vibrant illustrations, Burgess’ poetic language enhances the sensory experience of fireworks.” When you write poems with kids, you see how immediately they get this,” Burgess told NPR in 2025 in a conversation about his book Words with Wings and Magic Things. “If you read a poem aloud to kids, they start to dance in their seats.”
The Newbery Medal, awarded for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature, went to Renée Watson for All the Blues in the Sky. This middle-grade novel, also told in verse, follows 13-year-old Sage, who struggles with grief following the death of her best friend. Watson is also the author of Piecing Me Together, which won the 2018 Coretta Scott King Award and was also a Newbery Medal honor book. “I hope that my books provide space for young people to explore, and say, “Yeah, I feel seen,” Watson told NPR in 2018. “That’s what I want young people to do — to talk to each other and to the adults in their lives.”
This year’s recipients of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards include Will’s Race for Home by Jewell Parker Rhodes (author award) and The Library in the Woods, by Calvin Alexander Ramsey and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie (illustrator award). Arriel Vinson’s Under the Neon Lights received the Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe Award for New Talent.
Los Angeles based artist Kadir Nelson was honored with the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement. His work has appeared in more than 30 children’s books.
This year’s Newbery Honor Books were The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli, by Karina Yan Glaser; A Sea of Lemon Trees: The Corrido of Roberto Alvarez by María Dolores Águila and The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story by Daniel Nayeri.
Caldecott Honors books were Every Monday Mabel by Jashar Awan, Our Lake by Angie Kang, Stalactite & Stalagmite: A Big Tale from a Little Cave by Drew Beckmeyer, and Sundust by Zeke Peña.
Edited by Jennifer Vanasco and Beth Novey.
In the soundtrack of his youth, Walter Thompson-Hernández and his friends liked to devise a game of escape. Extending their arms in a v-formation at their side, they would race down the street on weekend afternoons imagining the freedom of the airplanes soaring across the blue infinity of their Huntington Park neighborhood.
Thompson-Hernández never lost that sense of dreaming. This month, he made his feature-length debut at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival with “If I Go Will They Miss Me,” a film of audacious sight and attentive storytelling that unfolds from the perspective of its protagonist Lil Ant, a Watts-raised, 12-year-old obsessed with airplanes and Greek mythology. Where coming-of-age stories often confront the crush of innocence — the fracture and shock of stolen virtue — Thompson-Hernández instead renders one about preservation. A preservation, in part, held together by Lozita (Danielle Brooks), a mom and wife working to keep her family whole now that Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson) is home from prison.
The film isn’t trying to absorb or recklessly mirror the traumas of the Black family so much as make a case for its nuance. In “If I Go,” Thompson-Hernández scraps the three-act structure for something more novelistic, a risk that a lesser director might have fumbled but one he turns into a profound taxonomy on grace. It is a story that interrogates — with a searching and brutal tenderness — the how, why and who of our emotional being. Even as Lil Ant yearns to be closer to his father, what the film doesn’t do is beg you to empathize with the conditions that its characters war against; instead, it demands that you simply acknowledge their presence, their wounds and their dreaming.
Walter Thompson-Hernández, director of “If I Go Will They Miss Me.”
(Michael “Cambio” Fernandez)
Thompson-Hernández’s cinematic canvas recalls a Los Angeles rarely afforded witness on screen. You won’t find any wasted thinking about the tired pathologies of urban decay; the film takes pleasure in depicting Black Angelenos in the fullness of their complexity, celebrating the toil and wonder of how people come together and fall apart, of how love is broken and remade. “There’s already a lyricism that exists in each of our lives,” he tells me. “In how we speak, in how our bodies move through the world, and how we touch each other. I’m sensitive to that.”
Though today he primarily works in the medium of film, Thompson-Hernández has a kaleidoscopic approach to craft. A former journalist for the New York Times, he’s as comfortable writing about the legacy of Black cowboys in Southern California (his 2020 book, “The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland,” was a New York Times bestseller) as he is directing a Beats By Dre commercial for the Super Bowl or shooting a sports documentary for Netflix. In 2025, his Portuguese-language film “Kites” — a story about personal reclamation in favelas of Rio de Janeiro — won the Special Jury Mention for Viewpoints at the Tribeca Film Festival. What Thompson-Hernández’s art so easily dispels, no matter the genre it finds a home in, are all the knotty, misguided and trite representations of otherness in our contemporary world. He is a seer of the unseen.
(Vladimir Santos) (Kemal Cilengir)
Jason Parham: A major theme in the film wrestles with what it means to find your place at home when you return. Was that a personal story?
Walter Thompson-Hernández: So much happens to the figures in our lives who travel away from us and eventually come back home. Thematically, this movie is about flight and transportation — both the physical flights that one takes, but also the emotional and spiritual flights. Big Ant, the father [character], returns after doing a stint in prison, but what his son sees as a Grecian 10-year war. That’s been my relationship to so many of the men who I grew up around.
JP: How so?
WTH: They would be gone for a while and we wouldn’t know where they would be. Then they would just show up after two or three or four years. We’d ask questions. It would be, “So-and-so was locked up” or “So-and-so had to go away for a while but now he’s back.” Greek mythology became a North Star for understanding very complicated characters in my own life.
JP: Why was that sense of imagination important to explore?
WTH: The aperture from which I lived my life was very small. It was a very contained world that only existed around a few geographic locations and a few blocks. Eventually I was able to leave. But very few of us get to make it out. Which is a weird sentence — get to make it out — because so many people want to be here and come here all the time. But there are those of us that got the chance to travel and to essentially fly. The older I got, the more I realized how small my world was as a child, but also how expansive and imaginative it was. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book “Between the World and Me,” there’s a passage that I always think about. I’m paraphrasing, but he tells his son something to the extent of — James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, those are yours. And then he says Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky and Simone de Beauvoir — listing all these European artists and thinkers — those are also yours. I’m extending that care and grace to the boy in this movie. A lot of us, we don’t get to dream in that way as Black or brown boys in L.A.
JP: What did young Walter dream about?
WTH: Our home was right in between both LAX flight paths. The sound of these airplanes is something that I’ll never forget. My mom and aunts still live in that neighborhood. When I go back, I forget how strong the sound of the airplanes are, how abrasive and all-encompassing. As a child, I was drawn to the mystery of them — where they were coming from and where they were going. I would imagine who was in them. My friends and I, we made up games where we would race airplanes on our bikes or we’d sprint down the block extending our arms. They had this power over us. The movie is me making sense of that mystery and beauty while also understanding that I have asthma because of them.
JP: You’re referring to the health complications people suffer from in areas downwind of the flight paths.
WTH: Cancer rates and asthma are so prevalent among the people who I grew up around. There is an irony in airplanes. On one hand, we can dream about them and all the places they can take us, but the tangible effects are that they are harming us. Jet fuelers, all those things. As children, how do we wrestle with those complex ideas, while on the ground wrestling with complex ideas about adolescence, about our parents. To say growing up under the LAX flight path is a complicated experience, there’s so much truth in that. Taking the mythology of these airplanes and applying that to the mythology that we create about adults in our lives is something that I hope people really feel in this movie.
JP: There are a lot of smart technical choices in the film, from the sound to the set design. Who were your influences?
WTH: I could reference films like “Killer of Sheep” or “The Battle of Algiers” or “Gummo” or “He Got Game”; there’s a list of at least 50 movies. But there’s something about looking at a Jacob Lawrence painting that offers me the biggest inspiration in terms of the dexterity and freedom and elasticity of Black bodies in space. There’s something about painting as a medium for me that lives outside of the limits of photography and film. There aren’t a lot of barriers and boundaries to how painters experience the world. Whether it’s Jacob Lawrence or Henry Taylor or Winfred Rembert or Kerry James Marshall. I obviously study literature, photography and film, but painting is where I go for ideas around framing and composition.
(Vladimir Santos)
JP: The film plays with different interpretations of light. How would you describe your relationship to light?
WTH: I am so drawn to natural lighting. I’m drawn to patient frames. Usually the frame is a middle shot or a wide shot. And there’s inserts and close-ups sometimes, but I feel very confident in the way that we stage and we block the scene. I feel confident that the information is gonna exist on screen. When I was a journalist at the New York Times, I didn’t just write everything, I also photographed everything I worked on. In terms of creating a visual language, I feel very, very comfortable framing and creating compositions in film. A lot of times you watch movies that feel over-lit. There’s too much information that we are able to gather. Working with our cinematographer, Michael Fernandez, we trust the audience so much, almost too much. If something feels a bit darker, if something is not lit in a way that feels a little too highly produced, I trust that someone will still be able to recognize and find the truth and honesty in every frame.
JP: So much so that L.A. begins to feel like its own character. Was there a certain story — one that hasn’t been told about the city — that you wanted to illuminate?
WTH: So many of us grew up watching ’90s L.A. movies: “South Central,” “Menace II Society,” “Friday.” All the Chicano gangster movies, “Blood In Blood Out.” There was also “Heat.” There’s so many movies about Los Angeles in the ’90s that really got L.A. in a way that most modern day movies about Los Angeles don’t. Something happened along the way where people who weren’t from L.A. started to make movies about Los Angeles. It felt a bit tropey often. It created a checklist. “Oh, it needs a lowrider. It needs a palm tree. It needs perfect orange, cotton candy lighting.” It feels kinda corny, if I’m being honest. For a lot of us, I don’t have to tell you that this movie is set in L.A. You feel it, you hear it.
JP: Yes, you hear it. I appreciated how the sonic texture — whether it was a Nate Dogg track or radio spots from Power 106 — helped ground the viewer not only in what they were witnessing, but why.
WTH: Sonically, I’m having a conversation in this movie about how this once-primarily Black community set in Nickerson Gardens in Watts was once over 90% Black, today is over 80% Latino. Which is a real conversation about change, about how Black people have been getting pushed out for generations, but also a complex story about immigration. It’s not always violence, there’s also peace and all this other stuff. The way I explore that is through sound and music. If you notice, this family, the Harris family, they hear a lot of Spanish-language music coming from a neighbor’s home, coming from the outside. There’s a version of that that feels more soapboxy, where I’m telling somebody in dialogue or in the scene that this community was once Black and it’s almost no longer Black. For me, it just felt more interesting to hear that. We’re hearing a Mexican ice cream truck and all these other things. That’s also telling us that this family is experiencing demographic change.
JP: If we can, I want to talk about the state of Hollywood —
WTH: It was so hard to get this movie made, man. It was a challenge. If I’m being incredibly honest with you, I think there was a run beginning in 2020 or so, where a lot of people felt the urge and maybe pressure to support movies made by women and people of color.
JP: Without question.
WTH: And people were supported in ways that were incredible. But for one reason or another, some of those movies didn’t do too well. They didn’t make the money back, which we can sit here and debate about why that happened. I tried to make this movie at the tail end of that run of support. Everyone in Hollywood loved the script. Everyone in Hollywood loved me. Everyone said, “Hey man, we love this. And we love you so much. But we supported something similar a year or two ago and we’re not doing that anymore.” I heard that so much, and from people that would surprise you. Then, in 2023, I got involved in the Sundance Catalyst program. The program invites financiers to finance eight independent movies. [“If I Go”] really took a lot of support and a lot of effort from people who believed in me and believed in the script. It was an interesting time to make an independent movie about a Black family from Los Angeles.
JP: Does the reality of industry have any bearing on the art you want to create versus the art it’s ready for?
WTH: The art that I want to make looks at humans making sense of their lives and the world in a way that maybe we haven’t seen before. There’s a lot of lyricism. There’s all sorts of things. I don’t know if I’m necessarily thinking about the movie industry when I make the art that I make. People don’t know what they want until they see it, until they feel it. I always say this: Sometimes you make something that exists in time and sometimes you make things that are of time. When people are making things that are of time, it’s responding to the zeitgeist or weird ideas around marketing and what’s popular.
JP: What’s trending on TikTok.
WTH: Exactly. It feels so reactionary. That’s of time. I like to think about making things that are in time. In time, for me, is making art that is in conversation with this beautiful legacy of artistry and of filmmaking. It’s making things without thinking about the moment. It’s thinking about truth in character, truth in dialogue, truth in scene, truth in composition, truth in sound. That’s what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about honesty. When it comes to my art, I always want to be in time.
Jason Parham is a senior writer at Wired and a documentary producer. He is a frequent contributor to Image.
(Michael “Cambio” Fernandez)
Lifestyle
Pretty hurts (and then some) in Ryan Murphy’s body-horror ‘The Beauty’ : Pop Culture Happy Hour
Ashton Kutcher as The Corporation in The Beauty.
Eric Liebowitz/FX
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Eric Liebowitz/FX
The Beauty stars familiar faces from the Ryan Murphy universe, including Evan Peters, as well as new collaborators like Ashton Kutcher. In the show, a genetic biotech serum has been engineered to transform people into ridiculously good-looking supermodels. But there’s at least one problem: Eventually, those supermodels are dying suddenly, horrifically and spectacularly. Is it astute commentary, crass exploitation, or maybe a bit of both? Well, it’s definitely a Ryan Murphy production, through and through.
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