Ava DuVernay’s Origin and the Utility of Caste

Dearest Reader,

When I heard that filmmaker Ava DuVernay was making a feature film based on Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson’s brilliant non-fiction work Caste (published in 2020), I was very curious to see how DuVernay would weave a narrative from such dense intellectual material. When I finally saw Origin (2023) written, directed and produced by …