Winner of the Emmy, BAFTA, and Peabody Awards, Academy Award nominee Ava DuVernay is a writer, director, producer, and film distributor. Her directorial work includes the historical drama SELMA, the criminal justice documentary 13TH, and Disney’s A WRINKLE IN TIME, which made her the highest-grossing black woman director in American box office history. Based on the infamous case of The Central Park Five, her next project is entitled WHEN THEY SEE US and will be released worldwide on Netflix in May 2019. Currently, she is overseeing production on her critically-acclaimed TV series QUEEN SUGAR, her new CBS limited series THE RED LINE, and her upcoming OWN series CHERISH THE DAY. Winner of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival’s Best Director Prize for her micro-budget film MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, DuVernay amplifies the work of people of color and women of all kinds through her non-profit film collective ARRAY, named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies. DuVernay sits on the advisory board of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and chairs the Prada Diversity Council. She is based in Los Angeles, California.
Ava Marie DuVernay (born August 24, 1972) is an American filmmaker. She won the directing award in the U.S. dramatic competition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for her second feature film Middle of Nowhere, becoming the first black woman to win the award. For her work on Selma (2014), DuVernay became the first black woman to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director, and also the first black female director to have her film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.[4][5] In 2017, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for her film 13th (2016).
DuVernay’s 2018 Disney children’s fantasy film A Wrinkle in Time made her the first black woman to direct a live-action film earning $100 million at the U.S. box office but had losses of up to $131 million. The film received mixed reviews, with critics taking issue with the film’s heavy use of CGI. The following year, she created, co-wrote, produced, and directed the Netflix drama limited series When They See Us, based on the 1989 Central Park jogger case, which has earned critical acclaim.[ The series was nominated for 16 Emmy Awards including the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Limited Series and won the Critics’ Choice Television Award for Best Limited Series. In 2021, she co-created an autobiographical miniseries with former NFL player Colin Kaepernick titled Colin in Black & White.
In 2017, DuVernay was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.
In 2020, DuVernay was elected to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences board of governors as part of the director’s branch.
Ava Marie DuVernay was born on August 24, 1972, in Long Beach, California. She was raised by her mother, Darlene (née Sexton), an educator, and her stepfather, Murray Maye. The surname of her biological father, Joseph Marcel DuVernay III, originates with Louisiana Creole ancestry. She grew up in Lynwood, California (near Compton). She has four siblings.
During her summer vacations, she would travel to the childhood home of her father, which was not far from Selma, Alabama. DuVernay said that these summers influenced the making of Selma, as her father had witnessed the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.
In 1990, DuVernay graduated from Saint Joseph High School in Lakewood. At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), she was a double BA major in English literature and African-American studies. Ava is an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
Despite the acclaim DuVernay has garnered in the film and television industries, DuVernay did not pick up a camera until age 32. DuVernay’s first interest was in journalism, a choice influenced by an internship with CBS News. She was assigned to help cover the O.J. Simpson murder trial. DuVernay became disillusioned with journalism, however, and decided to move into public relations, working as a junior publicist at 20th Century Fox, Savoy Pictures, and a few other PR agencies. She opened her own public relations firm, The DuVernay Agency, also known as DVAPR, in 1999.
Through DVAPR she provided marketing and PR services to the entertainment and lifestyle industry, working on campaigns for movies and television shows, such as Lumumba, Spy Kids, Shrek 2, The Terminal, Collateral, and Dreamgirls.
Other ventures launched by DuVernay include Urban Beauty Collective, a promotional network that began in 2003 and had more than 10,000 African-American beauty salons and barbershops in 16 U.S. cities, expanded to 20 in 2008. They were mailed a free monthly Access Hollywood-style promotion program called UBC-TV,[3[3 the African-American blog hub Urban Thought Collective in 2008, Urban Eye, a two-minute long weekday celebrity and entertainment news show distributed to radio stations,[36] and HelloBeautiful, a digital platform for millennial women of color.
Career
Despite the acclaim DuVernay has garnered in the film and television industries, DuVernay did not pick up a camera until age 32. DuVernay’s first interest was in journalism, a choice influenced by an internship with CBS News. She was assigned to help cover the O.J. Simpson murder trial. DuVernay became disillusioned with journalism, however, and decided to move into public relations, working as a junior publicist at 20th Century Fox, Savoy Pictures, and a few other PR agencies. She opened her own public relations firm, The DuVernay Agency, also known as DVAPR, in 1999.
Through DVAPR she provided marketing and PR services to the entertainment and lifestyle industry, working on campaigns for movies and television shows, such as Lumumba, Spy Kids, Shrek 2, The Terminal, Collateral, and Dreamgirls.
Other ventures launched by DuVernay include Urban Beauty Collective, a promotional network that began in 2003 and had more than 10,000 African-American beauty salons and barbershops in 16 U.S. cities, expanded to 20 in 2008. They were mailed a free monthly Access Hollywood-style promotion program called UBC-TV,[34[3 the African-American blog hub Urban Thought Collective in 2008, Urban Eye, a two-minute-long weekday celebrity and entertainment news show distributed to radio stations, and HelloBeautiful, a digital platform for millennial women of color.[
Film
In 2005, over the Christmas holiday, DuVernay decided to take $6,000 and make her first film, a short called Saturday Night Life.[27][38] Based on her mother’s experiences, the 12-minute film was about an uplifting trip by a struggling single mother (Melissa De Sousa) and her three kids to a local Los Angeles discount grocery store. The film toured the festival circuit and was broadcast on February 6, 2007, as part of Showtime‘s Black Filmmaker Showcase.[citation needed]
DuVernay next explored making documentaries, because they can be done on a smaller budget than fiction films, and she could learn the trade while doing so. In 2007, she directed the short Compton in C Minor, for which she “challenged herself to capture Compton in only two hours and present whatever she found.” The following year, she made her feature directorial debut with the alternative hip hop documentary This Is the Life, a history of LA’s Good Life Cafe‘s arts movement, in which she participated as part of the duo Figures of Speech. This is the Life won audience awards at the ReelWorld Film Festival in Toronto, the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival, the Hollywood Black Film Festival, and the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival in Seattle.[40]
In 2011, DuVernay’s first narrative feature film, I Will Follow, a drama starring Salli Richardson-Whitfield, was released theatrically. DuVernay’s aunt Denise Sexton was the inspiration for the film. In an interview, DuVernay talked about how her real life experiences differed from the film: “I was a caregiver for my aunt, Denise Sexton, in the last year and a half of her life. She was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. She was a fighter and was active in her treatment to the end, which was different than the character in the film who wants to fight in a different way.”[40] The film cost DuVernay $50,000 and was made in 14 days. Roger Ebert called it “one of the best films I’ve seen about coming to terms with the death of a loved one.”[41][42] I Will Follow was an official selection of AFI Fest, Pan-African Film Festival, Urbanworld, and Chicago International Film Festival.
It wasn’t until after I Will Follow that DuVernay fully left her job in publicity. DuVernay stated: “I knew that as a black woman in this industry, I wouldn’t have people knocking down my door to give me money for my projects, so I was happy to make them on the side while working my day job.”
In the summer of 2011, DuVernay began production on her second narrative feature film, Middle of Nowhere, from a script she had written in 2003 but was unable to finance. The film drew from her own experiences growing up in Compton and Inglewood. The story focuses on the wife of an incarcerated man who is serving a 10 year sentence. She drops out of medical school in order to have more time and emotional energy to give to her incarcerated spouse. The film explores how the family’s of the incarcerated are also victims of the system and shows how commonly this burden of incarceration falls upon women of color. In an interview with the LA Times, DuVernay touched on her inspiration for the film, “The idea of looking at the victims of incarceration – the mothers, sisters and daughters — really came out of knowing women who were going through it.”
The film had its world premiere on January 20 at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it played in U.S. dramatic competition. It garnered the U.S. Directing Award: Dramatic for DuVernay. She was the first African-American woman to win the prize. DuVernay also won the 2012 Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award for her work on the film.
DuVernay was commissioned by the Smithsonian‘s National Museum of African American History and Culture to create a film about African-American history. Her August 28: A Day in the Life of a People explores six historical events that happened on the same date, August 28, in different years. It debuted at the museum’s opening on September 24, 2016. The 22-minute film stars Lupita Nyong’o, Don Cheadle, Regina King, David Oyelowo, Angela Bassett, Michael Ealy, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, André Holland and Glynn Turman. Events depicted include William IV‘s royal assent to the UK Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, the release of Motown‘s first number-one song, “Please Mr. Postman” by The Marvellettes, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 I Have a Dream speech, the landfall of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the night Senator Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.[46]
Michael T. Martin says, “DuVernay is among the vanguard of a new generation of black filmmakers who are the busily undeterred catalyst for what may very well be a black film renaissance in the making. He further speaks of DuVernay’s mission and “call to action” which constitutes a strategy “to further and foster the black cinematic image in an organized and consistent way, and to not have to defer and ask permission to traffic our films: to be self-determining.
The DuVernay test is the racial equivalent of the Bechdel test (for women in movies), as first suggested by The Guardian writers Nadia and Leila Latif and then by The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis in January 2016, asking whether “blacks and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories.”[49] It aims to point out the lack of people of color in Hollywood movies, through a measure of their importance to a particular movie or the lack of a gratuitous link to white actors.[50]
Selma
DuVernay directed Selma, a $20 million budget dramatic film, which is relatively low for a film of this caliber, about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights.[51] The movie, produced by Plan B Entertainment, was released on December 25, 2014 to critical acclaim. DuVernay in an interview at Indiana University stated that Selma would be “the first major feature film in theaters that has anything to do with King’s essential character making it a historical landmark in the history of biopics.
She made uncredited re-writes of most of the original screenplay by Paul Webb in order to emphasize King and the people of Selma as central figures.[53][54] In an October 2020 interview on The Carlos Watson Show, DuVernay claimed that she, not Webb, was the principal writer, saying that the biggest mistake of her career was allowing Paul Webb “to take credit for writing Selma when I wrote it In response to criticism by some historians and media sources who accused her of irresponsibly rewriting history to portray her own agenda, DuVernay said that the film is “not a documentary. I’m not a historian. I’m a storyteller”.[56]
The film was nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Song, but not Best Director, at the 2014 Academy Awards. The lack of diversity among the Oscar nominations for 2014 was the subject of much press, especially on Twitter. This film was the only one directed by a person of color that was nominated for the 87th Academy Awards. The award for Best Original Song went to “Glory” from Selma. DuVernay said that she had not expected to be nominated as director, so the omission did not really bother her, but she was disappointed that actor David Oyelowo, who portrayed King, was not nominated as Best Actor. She said that the obstacles to people of color being represented in the Academy Awards were systemic.[58]
After Selma, DuVernay was approached by executives to direct Marvel’s first film about a superhero of color, Black Panther, but she passed. In an interview with Essence DuVernay provided insight on why she passed on the project: “I think I’ll just say we had different ideas about what the story would be. Marvel has a certain way of doing things and I think they’re fantastic and a lot of people love what they do. I loved that they reached out to me. She also expressed her support for the project moving forward, “I love the character of Black Panther, the nation of Wakanda and all that that could be visually. I wish them well and will be first in line to see it.Duvernay with her Peabody Award for 13th at the 76th annual ceremony in 2017
13th
In July 2016, the New York Film Festival made the surprise announcement that 13th, a documentary directed by DuVernay, would open the festival. Until the announcement, no mention of the film had been made by either DuVernay or Netflix, the film’s distributor. Centered on race in the United States criminal justice system, the film is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlawed slavery (except as a punishment for a crime). DuVernay’s documentary opens with the statement that 25 percent of the people in the world who are incarcerated are incarcerated in the U.S., and argues that slavery has been effectively perpetuated in the U.S. through disproportionate mass incarceration of people of color. The film features several prominent activists, politicians, and public figures, such as Bryan Stevenson, Angela Davis, Van Jones, Newt Gingrich, Cory Booker, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michelle Alexander, and others, who discuss such issues as convict leasing, the war on drugs, and disproportionate arrests, convictions and sentencing of minorities.[63] It was also the first critically acclaimed documentary to highlight the tragic story of Kalief Browder.
It was released on October 7, 2016 on Netflix. 13th garnered acclaim from film critics and has a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 94 reviews. The critical consensus says: “13th strikes at the heart of America’s tangled racial history, offering observations as incendiary as they are calmly controlled.”[65] In a review from Awards Circuit, Angela Davis said “13th is probably the most important movie you’ll ever see.”[66] In 2017, the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 89th Oscars; DuVernay became the first black woman to be nominated by the academy as a director in a feature category.[68] The film also won a Peabody Award in 2017 and a Columbia Journalism School duPont Award in 2018.[70]
A Wrinkle in Time[edit]
Main article: A Wrinkle in Time (2018 film)
In 2010, it was announced that Disney carried the film rights to Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time which follows a young girl traveling through space and time. Following the success of Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland, Disney announced the hiring of Jeff Stockwell to write the screenplay for Cary Granat and his new Bedrock Studios. Cary Granat had previously worked with Disney on the Chronicles of Narnia and Bridge to Terabithia films. On August 5, 2014, Jennifer Lee was announced as the screenwriter, taking over from Stockwell, who had written the first draft.[73][74] On February 8, 2016, it was reported that DuVernay had been offered to direct the film, and she was confirmed as director later that same month.[75]
A Wrinkle in Time began filming in November 2016. DuVernay is the first woman of color to direct a live-action film with a budget of over $100 million, and the second woman to do so after Patty Jenkins (who directed Wonder Woman).[76]
The film was released in March 2018 and brought in $33 million in its opening weekend, second at the box office behind Black Panther. Following Disney’s Q2 earnings report in May 2018, Yahoo! Finance deduced the film would lose the studio anywhere from $86–186 million. Nonetheless, A Wrinkle in Time still made the list for the top 100 grossing movies of 2018, making Ava DuVernay one of four female directors that made the list that year.
Upon release, the film received mixed reviews, with critics “taking issue with the film’s heavy use of CGI and numerous plot holes” while “celebrating its message of female empowerment and diversity.”
Television
In 2010, DuVernay directed three TV documentaries. The first, two-hour concert film TV One Night Only: Live from the Essence Music Festival, was a mix of live performances and behind-the-scenes vignettes. It aired August 28, 2010, on TV One and showcases the U.S.’s largest annual African-American entertainment gathering, the Essence Music Festival. In 2010 it was held July 2–4 in New Orleans.[81] Two days later, BET premiered its first original music documentary, My Mic Sounds Nice: A Truth About Women and Hip Hop, a 41-minute long history of female hip hop artists.
On Thanksgiving 2010, TV One showed DuVernay’s 44-minute documentary special Essence Presents: Faith Through the Storm, about two black sisters who reclaimed their lives after personal devastation during Hurricane Katrina. “It was done for a client, for Essence. They wanted to talk about how faith helped them through, which was very important to them. So it is interspersed with gospel music, images of Katrina, their home and family.”
ESPN commissioned DuVernay to produce and direct Venus Vs., a documentary on Venus Williams‘s fight for equal prize money. This was to be included in their film series Nine for IX, which aired on July 2, 2013.
DuVernay also directed the John Legend episode of the performance-and-interview series HelloBeautiful Interludes Live, which was shown September 14, 2013 on TV One as the series’ broadcast premiere.
She also directed the eighth episode of the third season of the political thriller television series Scandal. The episode, titled “Vermont is for Lovers, Too“, premiered on November 21, 2013 on ABC.
In 2015, DuVernay executive produced and directed the CBS civil rights crime drama pilot For Justice, starring Anika Noni Rose.[ It was not picked up for distribution.[61]
That same year, DuVernay announced she would be creating and executive producing the drama series Queen Sugar, based on Natalie Baszile’s novel.[87][88]
Queen Sugar premiered September 6, 2016 on Oprah Winfrey Network to critical acclaim and positive reviews.[89] DuVernay wrote four episodes and directed two. On August 1, 2016, the series was renewed for a second season ahead of its television premiere; it aired in a two-night premiere on June 20 and June 21, 2017.[90][91] The series was renewed for a third season on July 26, 2017. In August 2018, OWN renewed the series for a fourth season, which premiered on June 12, 2019.[93][94]
On July 6, 2017, it was announced that Netflix had given the production When They See Us a series order consisting of four episodes. The series was created by DuVernay, who served as executive producer, co-writer, and director. Other executive producers credited, include Jeff Skoll, Jonathan King, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Rosenthal and Berry Welsh. Production companies involved with the series consisted of Participant Media, Harpo Films, and Tribeca Productions.[11] The series premiered on Netflix on May 31, 2019. Upon its release, the miniseries received universal critical acclaim.[95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103]
On June 25, 2019, Netflix announced that the miniseries had been streamed by over 23 million viewers within its first month of release.] It received a record number of 16 nominations for Emmy Awards for writing, directing, and acting for stars and supporting actors.
Advertising and music videos
In 2013, DuVernay partnered with Miu Miu as part of their Women’s Tales film series. Her short film The Door starred actress Gabrielle Union and reunited DuVernay with her Middle of Nowhere star Emayatzy Corinealdi. The film premiered online in February 2013 and was presented at the Venice Days sidebar of the 70th Venice International Film Festival in August.[107]
Also in August 2013, DuVernay released, through Vimeo, a second branded short film entitled Say Yes. The film was sponsored by cosmetic brand Fashion Fair and starred Kali Hawk and Lance Gross with Julie Dash, Victoria Mahoney, Lorraine Toussaint and Issa Rae appearing as extras.
In 2015, Apple Music and their ad agency Translation hired DuVernay to helm a series of three commercials starring Mary J. Blige, Taraji P. Henson and Kerry Washington. The first ad, Chapter 1, premiered during Fox‘s Emmy broadcast on September 20, 2015.[110] Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 debuted in November 2015 and February 2016, respectively.[111]
Her music video for the Jay-Z ft. Beyoncé song “Family Feud” premiered December 29, 2017 on Tidal.[112]
Film distribution and production
Main article: ARRAY
In 2010 DuVernay founded African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM), her own company to distribute films made by or focusing on black people. DuVernay refers to AFFRM as “not so much a business, but a call to action. Although she sees building strong business foundations for films is a priority, DuVernay has said that she stresses that the driving force of the organization is activism In 2015 the company rebranded itself under the name ARRAY, promising a new focus on women filmmakers as well.
DuVernay also owns Forward Movement, a film and television production company.[
Future projects
In 2013, she announced development on a narrative feature film entitled Part of the Sky and set in Compton.
In 2015, it was announced that DuVernay would be writing, producing, and directing a fictional account which will focus on the “social and environmental” aspects of Hurricane Katrina while including a love story and a murder mystery. David Oyelowo was said to be part of the project.
In 2018, it was announced that DuVernay would be directing a New Gods film for the DC Extended Universe On May 29, 2019, DuVernay announced that she and Tom King would co-write the film. The movie was no longer moving forward by April 2021.
On October 29, 2018, it was announced that DuVernay would be working with the estate of Prince to direct a biopic covering his life for Netflix.[120] However, in August 2019, DuVernay quit as a director due to “creative differences.
On February 11, 2020, news reports speculated about Ava DuVernay possibly co-producing and directing a Nipsey Hussle documentary for Netflix.[122]
On June 29, 2020, Netflix announced a six-episode series, created by Ava DuVernay and Colin Kaepernick, titled Colin in Black & White, centering on Kaepernick’s youth and various events in his life that has led him to be the activist he is today.
In October 2020, her next film, Caste, an adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson‘s book, was officially announced for Netflix.[124]
Other work
In September 2013, DuVernay started a podcast series called The Call-In,[ a series of phone conversations recorded by AFFRM of Black filmmakers of feature narrative and documentary work. DuVernay talks about her goals with The Call-In: “For people of color and women filmmakers, so often the questions we get asked are about being a woman or a person of color. So The Call-In was a space where we could just talk about craft.
On October 27, 2013, DuVernay gave one of the Executive Keynote addresses for Film Independent, a non-profit organization that produces the Film Independent Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival, at their 2013 Film Independent Form, a three-day event. She was one of two keynote speakers along with the Chief Executive Officer of Netflix, Ted Sarandos.[127]
DuVernay, in a keynote address at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival, shared that she was the seventh person asked to direct Selma and described her experience at the 2015 Oscars, while being an honor to attend, as just “a room in L.A.
In February 2018 it was announced that DuVernay, along with producer Dan Lin and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, had launched the Evolve Entertainment Fund. The fund’s mission is to promote inclusion and provide an opportunity for under-served communities to pursue a dream in the entertainment industry.
Since May 2019, DuVernay has cohosted The Essentials, a weekly film series on Turner Classic Movies, with Ben Mankiewicz. DuVernay has appeared in wraparounds each Saturday night on the channel, discussing a wide range of films, including Marty, Ashes and Embers, Harlan County, USA and La Pointe Courte.[134]
Style and Themes
DuVernay has two primary areas of interest: the first, exploring the intricacies of the Black American family, particularly “black women’s agency and subjectivity”[135] within the family and within a racist, patriarchal society. The second, is exploring the injustices that have affected, and have continued to affect, Black families and communities throughout history.
A lot of her filmography works within both of these areas of interest simultaneously. For example, Selma, a film about an important historical march and a film about Martin Luther King Jr., makes a huge effort to center and explore the important female activists that played a role in the event: “Selma does afford viewers with a variegated window into the lives of a few of the Black women that participated…Each woman is shown within the film to propel the Selma campaign–sometimes in the background, other times in the foreground, yet always in practically indispensable ways.”[136] DuVernay has made it a focus of her activist filmmaking to center Black women in her work.
One of the social issues that DuVernay repeatedly returns to in her work is mass incarceration and the effects of incarceration on African American communities. This is the main topic of her Netflix documentary, 13th, which finds the roots of mass incarceration in the legal end of slavery. The film moves chronologically through history, keeping “a running total of the rapidly rising incarceration numbers since the 1970s; it works to contextualize these rising digits with a grand narrative that weaves together the racist, political, and financial motivations that paved the nation’s way to mass incarceration.” DuVernay’s television work addresses this as well: When They See Us depicts the ways in which the U.S. justice system targets Black people and other people of color, and in her show Queen Sugar one of the primary characters “is a convicted felon whose prison past makes it difficult for him to find a job and puts an ongoing strain on his relationship with his family.”[ This is an issue that DuVernay returns to again and again in her work.
Middle of Nowhere, encapsulates both of DuVernay’s areas of interest: it puts a Black woman at the center of its narrative and depicts the ways in which incarceration affects her life and the life of her family. This fictional story shows the ways in which incarceration infiltrates the lives of even those who are not in prison through close association with someone who is incarcerated. This issue is particularly relevant to Black women as a vast majority of America’s prisoners are Black and male: “burdens of carceral care fall most heavily on those intimately tied to the incarcerated as partners, spouses, parents, and children–demographics that are often marginalized.”[139]
The cinematography and staging of the film emphasize the protagonist, Ruby’s, own entrapment via association to incarceration. Ruby puts her life on hold to provide emotional, legal, and financial support for her incarcerated husband, Derek. In Marquita Smith’s analysis of the film, she explains that “carceral logic dictates that those who desire to maintain contact with incarcerated spouses…must endure an often invisible form of punishment…which criminalizes caring for the incarcerated.”[139] When Ruby visits Derek, the camera takes special notice of the ways in which her own freedoms and bodily autonomy are restricted within the prison: “the camera follows the various examination acts, lingering on Ruby’s body parts as they are inspected.” Lastly, there is a visual parallel drawn between the women who are visiting and the inmates. The women are often shown in lines and shot from behind fences and bars. They are herded into the visitation room in a way that parallels the male prisoners. DuVernay frames Ruby in a larger context of incarceration and its peripheral effects by showing her among a community of women whose situations parallel Ruby’s. We see Ruby riding the bus to the prison with many other women, most of whom are Black, waiting in line with these women, and eventually being shuffled into the meeting area with these women. In the scene where Ruby visits Derek on their anniversary after hearing that he is up for parole, the camera pans over many other couples who sit in the visiting room with them- “by panning to show the various families in the visitation room before focusing on the protagonist, the film enables viewers to see beyond Ruby’s individual happiness and recognize the importance of intimacy for the collective.”
Personal life
DuVernay is private about her romantic life, though she has never been married and has no children.[140]
