SCAD Savannah Gala Screening of “Origin”

Celebrated filmmaker, writer, and director Ava Duvernay greeted Savannah last Saturday with humility and humor when she accepted the 26th annual SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s Virtuoso Director Award.

Duvernay released her screening of Origin, the adapted film based upon a love story about Pulitzer Prize Winner Isabel Wilkerson. The biopic was partly filmed in Savannah. It is a riveting investigative report about race, class, and dehumanization systems found over centuries in the United States, Germany, and India. Those themes were defined based on facts that Wilkerson researched for the book “Caste – The Origins of Our Discontents.”

The film weaved Wilkerson’s story and it was played by renowned actresses and actors: Aunjanue L. Ellis, Jon Bernthal, Emily Yancy, Niecy Nash-Betts, and others. The main character faced re- peated grief and death, but it never stopped her from writing her book. History was unraveled and reconnected during Wilkerson’s reporting about the origins of racism in America, the caste system in India, and Nazi Germany’s persecution of 6 million Jews. She researched those aspects and connected them to the caste system. The late Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited India and he saw the caste system and how the people were debased, and saw the underclass and centuries of the hierarchy. Africans were enslaved and forced for centuries to work as free labor in the United States and became an underclass used by White Supremacy’s laws. Nazi Germans used the U.S. White Supremacy and Jim Crow Laws from the South to apply them to the Jewish community before burning their books and eliminating 6 million Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Still today in India, the Dalit caste system exists, and they’re called “untouchables.” In America, thousands of African Americans are killed for no reason. And books are being removed from libraries like the Nazis removed and burned books from the Jewish community in the 1930s. And the marrying of mixed race and religion is still frowned upon.

When Duvernay asked how the audience would respond to the independent film, she said that she cannot prescribe what people feel but she hope that they will feel something. “I was trying to construct something that said, if I can make you fall in love with these people, I can make you feel her love for her family.”

Then, the movie might move people The festival filmgoers gave Duvernay and her acclaimed producer Paul Garnes, an ovation for Origin. It will be released in theaters next December.

Tina A. Brown, MFA, is an independent journalist and author.

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