Filmmaker Ava DuVernay will return to the Toronto International Film Festival with her latest offering, Origin. DuVernay’s film will have a gala screening at Roy Thomson Hall on Monday, September 11. DuVernay will be in attendance.
Written, produced, and directed by Academy Award nominee DuVernay, Origin chronicles the remarkable life and work of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson (played by Academy Award nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) as she investigates the genesis of injustice and uncovers a hidden truth that affects us all.
Origin stands as a unique account of the intimacy within a writer’s quest for truth. DuVernay creates powerful cinematic images from the stories that Wilkerson brought to light in her non-fiction work “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” as well as the tragic moments of her personal life which framed her writing. It results in a deeply moving portrait of grief and healing–both personally and in the world.
“Ava DuVernay’s Origin is a brilliantly crafted showcase of her talent as a writer, producer, and director. This is audacious filmmaking on a grand, global scale,” said TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey, “DuVernay deftly weaves Isabel Wilkerson’s big idea about how we live into a beautiful narrative of passion and discovery. I can’t wait for Toronto audiences to feel its power.”
Paul Garnes and DuVernay produced Origin under her ARRAY Filmworks banner, and Thane Watkins serves as co-executive producer.
Along with Ellis-Taylor and Jon Bernthal, Origin stars Niecy Nash-Betts, Vera Farmiga, Audra McDonald, Nick Offerman, Blair Underwood, Connie Nielsen, Emily Yancy, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Finn Wittrock, Victoria Pedretti, Isha Blaaker, and Myles Frost. The team of artists behind Origin was led by cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd, ASC, production designer Ina Mayhew, editor Spencer Averick A.C.E, composer Kris Bowers, costume designer Dominique Dawson, and casting director Aisha Coley.
Making History With “Sugarcane,” Lensing “Nosferatu,” and Sounding Out “A Complete Unknown”
While being nominated for an Academy Award is a high honor, it carries even greater significance for directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie whose Sugarcane (National Geographic) is in the running for the Best Documentary Feature Film Oscar. Gaining recognition from Hollywood--which has a cinematic history of cowboys and Indians fare in which the Indigenous are stereotyped, dehumanized and villainized--means all the more for a documentary chronicling the strength, righteousness and resiliency of real-life Native people as they push back against cultural genocide. Sugarcane is a groundbreaking investigation into an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church in Canada, revealing years of forced separation, assimilation and abuse that Indigenous children endured, part of a cycle of intergenerational trauma. The story began to emerge publicly in 2021 when evidence of unmarked graves was discovered on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Mission near Williams Lake, British Columbia, a boarding school that operated until 1981. What happened there reflects horrific conditions at many such schools--in the U.S. and Canada--with land across North America taken from Indigenous people who were then subjected to physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Their families were torn apart as part of a concerted effort to take them from--and to destroy--their culture. Yet these people persevered as Sugarcane also introduces us to a community that has the resolve to find its roots--translating into a stirring triumph of the human spirit. For Hollywood to embrace this film with an Oscar nod, said NoiseCat, is gratifying given that cinema for a century has had Indigenous people “positioned at the end of a gun barrel in Westerns, which the... Read More