Origin (12A)
Directed by Ava DuVernay

 
THERE is a great deal to unpack in Ava DuVernay’s powerful intellectual drama about mind-blowing ideas explored through the prism of love and grief. 

Inspired by Isabel Wilkerson’s non-fiction work Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the film follows Isabel (played superbly by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), an African-American writer, as she suffers three major personal losses while researching her new book. This is a thesis that links racism with the caste system and the death of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager who was shot dead while walking home from a convenience store in Florida in 2012. 

The film blurs the lines between reality and drama from the get-go as you hear the voice of Trayvon’s killer in the actual call he made to the emergency services just before he murdered him.  

In one scene where Isabel is researching at the Berlin Public Library the real-life librarian appears opposite her in a small speaking part. This sets the tone for the appearance of historical figures and flashback reconstructions. 

Part love story and with a documentary quality about it I have not seen a film quite like this which challenges you intellectually and makes you see racism and caste in a whole new light. 

Isabel, who travels to Germany and India, examines whether racism is simply the means to keep a group in society subjugated and under control like caste. She investigates how during the 1930s a group of Nazi lawyers studied US race laws, that discriminated against black Americans and segregated them from white Americans, in a bid to implement the same in Germany against the Jews. The aim was to dehumanise them and make them powerless. Another means was to ban interracial marriage and thus reinforce the superiority of one race over another, Isabel argues.

Some of the film’s most romantic moments were apparently inspired directly by DuVernay’s discussions with Wilkerson about her late husband Brett (Jon Bernthal). In the film Isabel is battling against black prejudices from her own community for having married a white man who was the love of her life. 

It is a thought-provoking yet moving film which will stay with you long after it is over and may make you want to read the original text. 

Out in cinemas today.