First trailer for Ava DuVernay’s prison doc ’13th’ is a story “150 years in the making”

Erik Anderson September 26, 2016

The first trailer for 13th, from Ava DuVernay (Selma), is a searing indictment on the enslavement of the black community in the United States via the 13th amendment and the political and financial explosion of the for-profit US prison system. The documentary, the first from DuVernay, features archival footage and testimonies from activists, politicians, and historians, including Michelle Alexander, Bryan Stevenson, Van Jones, Newt Gingrich, Angela Davis, Senator Cory Booker, Grover Norquist, Khalil Muhammad, Craig DeRoche, Shaka Senghor, Malkia Cyril and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Clips of Donald Trump and both Hillary and President Bill Clinton in a very unflattering light based on comments made in the 1990s find themselves incredibly relevant in the current firestorm of the 2016 election and the unprecedented visibility of murders of black people by white police officers in the camera-ready world that we inhabit today.

13th premieres on Netflix, in a full global launch of all countries and territories, on October 7th, which is incidentally the very same day as Nate Parker’s slave rebellion film The Birth of a Nation hits theaters. 13th will also open this year’s New York Film Festival on September 30th.

From Netflix:

[box type=”shadow” align=”” class=”” width=””]The title of Ava DuVernay’s extraordinary and galvanizing documentary 13TH refers to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” The progression from that second qualifying clause to the horrors of mass criminalization and the sprawling American prison industry is laid out by DuVernay with bracing lucidity. With a potent mixture of archival footage and testimony from a dazzling array of activists, politicians, historians, and formerly incarcerated women and men, DuVernay creates a work of grand historical synthesis.[/box]

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.