By
Alexandra Heilbron on January 17, 2024 | Leave a Comment
Origin received a lot of buzz while making the rounds of film festivals and rightly so. Directed by Ava DuVernay, this tells the true life story of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). The film opens with the release of her latest book and all the excitement surrounding it. Isabel seems to have it all — a loving husband (Jon Berntthal), a supportive family, and a very successful career.
Just after her book comes out, she’s asked to write a newspaper article about the tragic events surrounding Trayvon Martin’s horrifying murder, as he walked home from a corner store with a bag in his hands, talking to his girlfriend on the phone.
Isabel turns down the offer, wanting to focus on her family and new book, but she can’t get the events of Trayvon Martin’s murder out of her mind. When tragedy suddenly hits her life in more than one way, in order to get her mind off her overwhelming grief, she begins to look into racism in its many forms.
Isabel realizes that in order to study various societies, she needs to do research in the form of traveling to places where discrimination of other people has been the worst — Germany, where the Holocaust separated Jews from society and murdered them; India, where in spite of everyone being of the same race, a portion of society is called “Untouchable” and relegated to mopping up other “higher caste” people’s bodily waste. And finally, the States, where many years after they were emancipated from slavehood in the 1860s, Black people have been treated poorly, segregated, and as if they were not equal to whites.
Her findings and conclusions are astonishing. The stories we see are touching, especially one of a little Black boy on a baseball team of white boys who don’t see him as any different — but when they go to a swimming pool, the blatant discrimination from an adult affects all the boys — even years later when they look back on the incident as adults.
This powerful movie is based on the book that came of Wilkerson’s research, titled Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. It gives us information that is astounding, but in an extremely entertaining way, with stories that are absolutely captivating. ~Alexandra Heilbron
5 out of 5 stars.
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