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Ava DuVernay and Common attend the 54th New York Film Festival Opening Night Gala Presentation of her film The 13th September 30, 2016 in New York City.

It is the first time a film by a black filmmaker has opened the NYFF and the first time a documentary has opened the festival.

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Somewhere in between shooting HBO fashion documentary The Battle of Versailles, her own TV series Queen Sugar, and the Disney feature A Wrinkle in Time, Ava Duvernay has filmed a secret documentary about systematic racism and the prison-industrial complex in America. The 13th, named after the 1865 constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, will open the New York Film Festival in September. It will be the first documentary to do so in the festival’s 53-year history, and the first film by a black woman to do so. The timely story is then slated for an October 7 release on Netflix and in theaters.

The film will reportedly include footage of the Civil Rights Movement, the Ku Klux Klan, Black Lives Matter activists, and interviews with leading political figures and scholars including Michelle Alexander, who wrote the 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Previous festival openers include The Walk and Gone Girl, the latter of which pulled in a whopping $369.3 million at the box office. Festival director Kent Jones told the New York Times that the decision to lead with The 13th is a testament to its storytelling power. “There’s no other answer besides the fact that it’s a great film,” he said. “It meets the moment head on. She’s redefining what the national conversation is, and doing it in a very powerful way.” X

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Secret Ava DuVernay Documentary The 13th to open NYFF

Chronicling the history of racial inequality in the United States, The 13th examines how our country has produced the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with the majority of those imprisoned being African-American. The title of DuVernay’s extraordinary and galvanizing film refers to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution—“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 incarceration and the prison industry in the U.S. is laid out by DuVernay with bracing lucidity.

The film was carefully kept a secret until the announcement that it was opening the New York Film Festival which hints that it may be being positioned as a contender for the Oscars. Recent films that opened the NYFF and went on to success at the Oscars include Gone Girl, Captain Phillips, Life of Pi, The Social Network, The Queen.

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The 13th dir. Ava DuVernay (2016)

The 13th chronicles the history of racial inequality in the United States, examining how the country has produced the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with the majority of those imprisoned being African American. The title of the film of course refers to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution: “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 … ”

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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.

Ava DuVernay takes on American’s prison system in the first trailer for The 13th.

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…D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is a great, I don’t know, jumping-off point to talk about the immersion that we, as Americans, have had with images that show black men, black people as criminals, because it really and truly started with that film, started with that film in a way that it was using the power of the cinematic image to subjugate, to turn the tide, to change opinion. You know, D.W. Griffith was a masterful filmmaker. He used a lot of techniques that we still use today. He innovated them, he invented them. Too bad he was a racist, because all of those tools that he was using was used to make people think that people like—other people think that people like me are less than they are.

Ava DuVernay (via azspot)

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Hurricane Matthew crashed into southwestern Haiti as a Category 4 storm Tuesday morning, dumping rain and scouring the land with maximum sustained winds of 145 miles per hour.

It is the first Category 4 storm to make landfall in Haiti since 1964, when Hurricane Cleo also hit the island nation’s southwestern peninsula.

At 7 a.m. local time, the eye of Hurricane Matthew sat over Les Anglais, Haiti. The hurricane is so large and powerful that people in a 40-mile radius from its center were under hurricane warnings, and tropical storm-force winds were lashing areas as far as 185 miles away, near the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.

‘The Situation … Is Truly Catastrophic’; Hurricane Matthew Slams Into Haiti

Photo: Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images Caption: Streets in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, were inundated Tuesday after Hurricane Matthew made landfall in the country’s southwest.

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They used his head to smash the windshield. WTF. (x)

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Booooooost!

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When you leave dad at home alone with the kids #fail #getit #omg #lol #failvine #vinefail #hahaha #wow #insane #omfg

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Troops referred to Ferguson protesters as ‘enemy forces’, emails show

Documents detailing military mission during unrest over the police killing of Michael Brown designated ‘enemy forces’ to include ‘general protesters’

Apr. 17 2015

As the Missouri national guard prepared to deploy to the streets of Ferguson last year during protests sparked by the shooting death of Michael Brown, the troops used highly militarised language such as “enemy forces” and “adversaries” to refer to citizen demonstrators.

Documents detailing the military mission divided the crowds that national guards would be likely to encounter into “friendly forces” and “enemy forces” – the latter apparently including “general protesters”.

A briefing for commanders included details of the troops’ intelligence capabilities so that they could “deny adversaries the ability to identify Missouri national guard vulnerabilities”, which the “adversaries” might exploit, “causing embarrassment or harm” to the military force, according to documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request by CNN.

And in an ominous-sounding operations security briefing, the national guard warned: “Adversaries are most likely to possess human intelligence (HUMINT), open source intelligence (OSINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), technical intelligence (TECHINT), and counterintelligence capabilities.”

In less military-style language, the briefing then goes on to detail how protesters might obtain this intelligence – a list of sources no more technical than public records, social media and listening to conversations “being carried out in public” by civic officials or law enforcement, according to the report.

The Missouri governor, Jay Nixon, deployed the state national guard to Ferguson in August after local police forces caused international uproar by firing teargas on demonstrators while armed with gear that even US military veterans said was better suited for the streets of Afghanistan than an American suburb.

“It’s disturbing when you have what amounts to American soldiers viewing American citizens somehow as the enemy,” local alderman Antonio French told CNN.

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Three years into the water crisis

And nobody gives a sh*t

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Arkansas legislator arrested for observing police

Civil rights attorney John Walker says he has been bearing witness to the unfair treatment of African-Americans by police since the 1960s. But on Sept. 26, Walker’s decision to watch an arrest in progress in Little Rock, Arkansas, didn’t just annoy the on-scene officers — it got him, and an attorney from his law firm, arrested. The worst part: It was deja vu.

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