Ava DuVernay is one of Hollywood's hardest working directors. Since Selma came out in 2014 to wide acclaim, she's been highly sought after for projects both big and small. Remarkably, she has managed to parlay the attention into working on projects that truly excite her: turning down a Marvel film in favor of a big-budget adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time for Disney and executive producing a TV series, Queen Sugar, for OWN. In the middle of it all, she also managed to make an extraordinary new documentary, the first ever to open the New York Film Festival, and comes to Netflix this week. The 13th, which paints a broad portrait of mass incarceration in the United States, is an eye-opening, engaging, emotional plea for a sea change in American politics and race relations.

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Using an impressive array of interview subjects, ranging from legendary political activist Angela Davis to The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander, 13th untangles the knots of history, revealing a clear thread of systemic racism and unjust action by a political system built by white people for the advancement of white people, and at the grave expense of all others.

"We struggled a lot with what the start of the story was," DuVernay says. "Ultimately I decided in telling the story and creating some kind of organizing principle for it, to just go in chronological order and let it build." That became the "key to the film," she says, focusing DuVernay and her team on showing the steps that led to where we are currently. "When we organized it logically and chronologically, you could see the growth." That's when she added the ticker, every five years, beginning in the 1960s, plainly illustrating the exponential rise in the number of incarcerated Americans over the decades.

Angela Davis in Netflix

The title refers to the 13th Amendment of the Constitution, and its exception clause, which effectively allows slavery to exist as a form of punishment for crime. DuVernay draws on that exception, written right into the system, to unpack the state of American mass incarceration. It's not an easy feat, stringing together over 150 years of history, from slavery, through the civil rights movement, all the way to our present moment, and come out the other side with a coherent argument about the way race has functioned in American society, but DuVernay pulls it off. In the space of only 100 minutes she lays everything on the table, point by point, thoroughly deconstructing the systems in place designed to oppress and continue oppressing people of color in America.

'13th' forces a reckoning with the present by tracing an often deplorable past.

DuVernay's sense for narrative powers the film, giving the audience more than just a textbook account of civil rights history. Right down to the editing choices, 13th forces a reckoning with the present by tracing an often deplorable past. It's even done through the use of music to move from one era to another. "I wanted to put the lyrics up just to break it up and remind you that this is not new," DuVernay says. "This has been talked about and our artists have been speaking about it the whole time."

The film is unsparing in its indictment of current political structures, showing past statements both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. "She's the one who supported the 1994 crime bill," DuVernay says of Clinton. "She's the one that said 'superpredators' years and years before anybody was thinking about [becoming] president, so this is just a part of the tapestry of talking about this issue." In a particularly brutal segment of the film, DuVernay juxtaposes clips of Donald Trump talking about "the good old days," when protesters would be punched in the face or carried out on stretchers, with archival footage from the civil rights movement of exactly that kind of violence.

Ava DuVernay at the New York Film Festival premiere of Marion Curtis/Netflix

Perhaps the most impressive section of the film covers the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative lobbying group in which corporate members interact with politicians and supply state legislatures with pre-written bills advancing corporate interests. The role of ALEC in the history of mass incarceration and prison privatization is astounding. "I think that's an untold story," says Lisa Graves, one of the film's talking heads and the Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy. "The corporate story is a key component of the magnitude of distortion that we're witnessing."

"Our relationship to criminal justice is not about criminal justice, it is about the economy, it is about the larger civil society," says Malkia Cyril, another of the film's subjects and the founder of the Center for Media Justice. In fact, it runs even deeper, right to "this whole idea of what a citizen is, who deserves to be a citizen, where the borders are of our nation, of our communities, of our bodies," she says. "I think that's what this film does," she says, "it does absolutely advance the vision for black lives."

The process of putting that vision together was tough, and also emotionally taxing. "I'm not good at self-care," DuVernay says. "I cried a lot making this film." The tears were worth it, though, to help make a change. "I believe that when you change what people think," she says, "then we have societal change." She compares it to the increased awareness of transgender issues in just the last few years, and how important that has been. That's what DuVernay hopes 13th will do for audiences: to open minds and widen perspectives, to advance the cause for the rights of black and brown people in America, and to shine a bright light on the incredible injustices of the justice system so that nobody who watches the film can look away any longer. In doing all that and a whole lot more, 13th is a remarkable success and one of the best films of the year.

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