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Ava DuVernay, the Oscar-nominated director of Selma and A Wrinkle in Time, has described the struggle she is having with her latest work, a five-part drama series for Netflix on the Central Park Five.

DuVernay said she was having a hard time finding the voice of the five teenagers who were wrongfully convicted of the rape of a Central Park jogger in 1989. The trouble comes, she said, from the difficulty finding any material from the time that told the story from the teenager’s perspective.

“I pored through every trial transcript, I’ve read everything about that case, and they have no voice. Even the voice they were given – in their forced confessions – was not their own voice. Every single thing, even their voice in the confession, is not their own.

“It’s flipped inside out. Every day I feel I’m wrestling with the story to try and turn it around, make it their story.”

As DuVernay was speaking, she pointed to the audience and invited a man in the front row to stand up. When Yusef Salaam rose he got a standing ovation. Salaam served more than five years in prison for a crime that he didn’t commit, having been released in 2002 along with the others of the Central Park Five.

Remarkably, no-one mentioned Donald Trump who spent a reported $85,000 to buy whole pages in New York newspapers calling for the five teenagers to be executed.