It's not a regular "movie" - it's something different than what you're used to. But if you're not moved by it I don't know what's wrong with you. It's like a biopic crossed with a documentary that isn't afraid to feel or sympathize.
Making a movie about the writing of a book is an almost impossible mandate. How to translate the process-the research, the long, lonely hours of filling screen after screen with prose, the invisible band of self-doubt that can encircle a writer during the toughest times-into terms that work visually on-screen, that draw an audience into a mode of work that's intensely private? Ava DuVernay pulls it off intelligently with Origin, playing in competition at the Venice Film Festival, which follows journalist Isabel Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as she brings her 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents from conception to completion.
Making a movie about the writing of a book is an almost impossible mandate. How to translate the process-the research, the long, lonely hours of filling screen after screen with prose, the invisible band of self-doubt that can encircle a writer during the toughest times-into terms that work visually on-screen, that draw an audience into a mode of work that's intensely private? Ava DuVernay pulls it off intelligently with Origin, playing in competition at the Venice Film Festival, which follows journalist Isabel Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as she brings her 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents from conception to completion.