Origin

I watched this tonight as part of AMC’s Screen Unseen program. For five dollars on select nights, audiences can watch a film before it gets wide release. Since there is no way of knowing what is being shown well in advance, a lot of people don’t know what they’re signing up for. In my screening, ten people walked out. I sat second row from the back and could see when people left and during what scene. Two people left during the opening scene, which depicts Trayvon Martin walking home on the night he was killed. A couple walked out when Isabel Wilkerson listened to the Trayvon Martin tapes, followed shortly by three more people. Another trio left when the Charlottesville white nationalist riots were mentioned. I was the only person of colour in the audience. If they had stayed - and while they would have disagreed - they would have seen the best film that Ava DuVernay has ever made. In a broad sense, Origin details the thesis of the book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson as she gathers materials, does research, and interviews people about their experiences and professionals about their areas of historical expertise. The book - and by extension the film - posits that there are commonalities between forms of systemic oppression, most notably in the film black people in America, Jews during Nazi Germany, and the Dalit of India. As Isabel, played wonderfully by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, explores these histories, DuVernay cross-cuts between the present day, recent past, Jim Crowe era United States, the rise of the Nazi party, and the life of Dalit peoples both past and present, creating a strong connective link between the shared suffering. Some may call it preachy, but to me, this along with Aunjanue’s voice over is the most effective way to get its point across. On a smaller scale, Origin is about grief and how we process it and move through and past it. Isabel loses both her husband and her mother early on in the film’s runtime. These two losses are what pushes her to work on Caste, a project that started from a friend and former editor asking her to cover the Trayvon Martin story three years after his death and spanned several years afterwards. This search for the connective tissue for all this human suffering distracts her from her pain, but not for long. These personal tragedies are intercut with these larger scenes of dehumanization, death, and subjugation. The personal is political and the political is personal. An early scene which a friend said caused people to walk out of their screening is exemplary of this. Early on in the film, Nick Offerman plays a plumber or some other contract handyman tasked with helping Isabel deal with flooding in her basement. His character is wearing a Make America Great Again hat. He is relatively uncooperative with Isabel, a black woman, and only offers to write her an estimate and doesn’t even look at her problem. Isabel mentions losing her mother and asks about his mother. He lost his mother when he was young and when she asks about his father he says he’s still alive and “as mean as they get”. This small moment foreshadows one of the most poignant moments of the film later on, something that is much larger than two people sharing a small moment of empathy with one another. The personal is political and the political is personal. Please do go watch this film. It is the most moving experience I have had in a theatre in a long time. I cried for about half of the film’s runtime. As someone who believes in an interconnectedness of all peoples, this hit me hard.