14TH: Oscar Winner Ava DuVernay about the Making of Netflix Most Overtly Political Documentary

 The feature focuses on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, recent attempts to strip its power, and the ways in which it represents the ideals and viability of American Way.

Netflix has set 14th for a brief theatrical run on November 27 ahead of a streaming premiere on December 4.

It’s a companion piece to her Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary 13th, a fiery yet rather simple work that probed mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex through the amendment that abolished slavery.

The 14th Amendment is not one as clear or simple. As politician Stacey Abrams puts it, the 14th Amendment is the “everything bagel” of constitutional amendments. As historian Eric Foner claims, the 14th is the most important since the Bill of Rights.

The new film comes on the heels of Origin, DuVernay’s 2023 narrative, which resonated with critics, but underperformed with audiences.

And once Trump was back in office, the amendment kept turning up in the news: due process, public debt, even its language around “insurrection or rebellion.”

What began as film about one contested constitutional guarantee was becoming larger, and harder to pin down as history was moving on. “This movie kicked my butt because it was like building a plane midflight, much stuff was coming in every day, everything was happening at once,” DuVernay says.

“My feelings about everything happening in the past three years–politically, culturally–are put into this film,” she says. “At least I’ve felt productive and not going crazy with worry, fear, anger.”

The film was made for Netflix, DuVernay’s “home studio,” having worked with the Ted Sarandos run streamer on such projects as the documentary 13th.

But 14th arrives as some of Hollywood’s largest companies have come under scrutiny for their handling of politically sensitive material. Amazon dropped the Sam Altman docudrama Artificial, stating, “We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio,” after striking a major deal with Altman’s OpenAI.

Apple, meanwhile, pushed the Jessica Chastain political-violence thriller, The Savant, by more than a year after the assassination of conservative Charlie Kirk

14th ranks among the more overtly political projects Netflix has evet backed, which made DuVernay wonder whether the company would stay out of her way: “I was hopeful they would continue to support the filmmakers in the way that they’ve established — and they did. I was hoping they would hold their stance under pressure to do otherwise.

“Everyone’s afraid, and I’m no exception — I’ve been cautioned about this material and about my points of view on all kinds of things,” DuVernay says. “We’ve seen a total recession in films by certain kinds of people and movies made for certain amounts of money–artists and executives feel a lot less free.”

A former film publicist, DuVernay broke out in the 2010s with the low-budget indies I Will Follow and Middle of Nowhere. Since then, she has made documentaries, limited TV series and big studio movies.  Her 2018 Disney tentpole A Wrinkle in Time disappointed at the box office, but a year later she directed the popular and Emmy-winning When They See Us.

She has grown less interested in being one of Hollywood’s designated spokespeople on representation. “I used to be the poster child of talking about this because I felt like it could make a difference. But what I’ve come to realize is it’s too difficult to do if enough people aren’t on board, and there just aren’t enough people on board. It doesn’t mean give up; it means just do it in other ways.”