Watching Ava DuVernay’s ‘Origin’ This Juneteenth Holiday
Origin (2023), a biographical film drama based on Pulitzer Prize-winning Isabel Wilkerson’s book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, is a thoughtful and honest portrayal of the global connections of oppression by way of the caste system. Emmy Award-winning producer and director Ava DuVernay offers this filmic connection through the lens of Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), a Black renowned journalist and author who synchronously disassembles social containers in her romantic life and in the caste system by tracing the interconnections between African American people in the U.S., Jewish people in Nazi Germany, and Dalit people in India. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor delivers a beautiful and empathetic performance as Isabel Wilkerson, while Ava DuVernay brings to life this significant research through cinematic intimacies with archives, memorials, statues, and ethnography. On this Juneteenth Day, Origin is a reminder that African American emancipation is linked to broader struggles for freedom that traverses both time and space.
The film begins by invoking the haunting experience of Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost) on the night George Zimmerman stole his life. The scene depicts Trayvon on his phone, returning from the store with his Arizona iced tea and Skittles while Zimmerman follows him through the neighborhood. This scene is woven together with a scene where Isabel and her elderly mother, Ruby Wilkerson (Emily Yancy), visits a new home for seniors. Ruby looks out of the small room window at the clouds and says, “I see a swimming pool with boys jumping in”.
Later in the film DuVernay brings to life Ruby’s vision of the boys jumping in the swimming pool. The film introduces Al Bright (Lennox Simms), an African American little league baseball champion in 1951. A park ranger prevents him from enjoying a celebratory swim in the public Whites-only pool with his teammates, and the film captures in slow-motion the ecstatic White boys jump into the pool as Al sits on the grass outside of the pool and watches them through a gate. This scene represents the haunting of racial injustice that confronts Ruby Wilkerson when she looks outside of the window at the clouds, and it is the same racial injustice orchestrated by caste that leaves Trayvon’s lifeless body on the grass that tragic night. A space for daydreaming and freedom dreaming—the clouds—becomes a site that reminds an elderly Black woman of the legacy of racism and caste.
DuVernay carefully represents the atmospheric violence of racism and the caste system with global scenes that cut into and are intertwined with one another. She does this earlier in the film when Isabel kisses her husband, Brett Hamilton (Jon Bernthal), outside of the airport before the scene transitions to Nazi Germany. This editing technique continues throughout the film and confronts the film’s witness with anthropological perspectives of the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany and its connection to the tiki torch-bearing neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia; the grief of Jewish memorial sites in Berlin, the disrespect by White maintenance workers to the Black homeowners who hire them, the codifying Meeting of 1934 and its connection to American race laws, lynching sites of Black men and their connection to the caste pillar of endogamy, and the dehumanization of Dalit people in India and its connection to stolen African people during the Middle Passage. The intertwining of these scenes creates the atmospheric effect of the caste system which, as the film states, is at once everywhere and yet invisible.
However, Origin does offer glimpses of hope for justice with the practice of refusal by August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock), Dr. Suraj Yengde’s intellectual contributions and connections with Martin Luther King Jr.’s activism, and the film’s social commentary. Origin also honors the love and care of Isabel’s family—her husband Brett Hamilton, her mother Ruby Wilkerson, and her cousin, Marion Wilkerson (Niecy Nash)—as a radical necessity to the development of her distinguished research project.
As we fire the grills, jam to the anointing sounds of Black cookout music, and celebrate African American emancipation this Juneteenth Holiday, let us remember that this fight for freedom traverses time and space.
Origin by ARRAY Filmworks is now streaming on Hulu.
—Dominique Young
