When Ava DuVernay approached Netflix about making a follow-up to “13th,” her acclaimed documentary about the legacy of the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery, she thought it was a fairly straightforward proposition. The 14th Amendment is best known for offering U.S. citizenship to everyone born in America, a right that is frequently attacked by the current administration.
That seemed like enough material for another film, but the two-year process of making “14th” taught her that the amendment contains so much more.
During a conversation with IndieWire’s Chris O’Falt at our Art of the Doc event in Los Angeles, DuVernay explained how the project evolved over time.
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“I thought we were talking about birthright citizenship. That’s what I sold to Netflix,” DuVernay said with a laugh. “We worked on it for two years. The whole first year we were making a movie about birthright citizenship. And then we started seeing the other parts get attacked. The parts where I was like ‘This is too hard, I don’t want to focus on these other parts.’ But when we started to hear them coming up in those headlines, you couldn’t leave that out.”
The duo discussed how the constitutional amendment “flies under the radar” compared to more notable ones that everyone memorizes in history class, despite containing important protections like the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause.
“It does [fly under the radar],” she said. “Which is wild, because it holds in it the rights that we abide by.I didn’t realize the depth that was in the 14th amendment. One of our folks in the film says it’s a constitution in and of itself. I didn’t know that the 13th, 14th, and 15th truly created a new constitution that got clicked onto the first one.”
Ultimately, DuVernay hoped that making her documentary can help steer the conversation in a way that allows future generations to see the value of these legal protections that we were previously able to take for granted.
“It really comes to who gets to tell the story, and whose voice is the loudest,” she said. “That really becomes what history is. It’s the stories we tell each other.”
Watch the complete conversation with DuVernay in the video above.
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