Ava DuVernay’s Origin to premiere at Imax

The Emancipation Support Committee Trinidad and Tobago (ESCTT), in collaboration with CinemaOne, will host the premiere and only screening in the Caribbean of Origin by Ava DuVernay.

The event takes place on August 4 at CinemaONE's Imax Auditorium, One Woodbrook Place, Port of Spain from 4 pm.

This premiere showing will be the closing event for the 25th anniversary of the Kwame Ture Memorial Lecture Series, (KTML@25).

DuVernay is the founder of the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement, a trailblazing director, producer, writer, marketer and film distributor. She is the 2024 Nominee at the NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Directing in a Motion Picture for Origin.

Origin is a sprawling, nonfiction exploration of the ways that caste systems have shaped different societies all over the world. It encompasses Germany’s persecution of Jews in the lead-up to World War II, India’s treatment of its Dalit people, and racism against African Americans in the United States. It presents an opening scene that follows Trayvon Martin on the night he was shot and killed.

She has adapted this film from the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson.

DuVernay’s Origin had a landmark viewing at the Venice Film Festival as the first film by an African American woman to play in competition. The film explores the rigid caste system of arbitrary hierarchies that stratify society and still divide us today.

The film will be followed by a panel discussion on Caste, Class, and Race – the shaping and reshaping our societies with sociologist Dr Tyehimba Salandy, and communications consultant Shabaka Kambon.

DuVernay made her feature film debut with the documentary, This is the Life (2008), a history on hip hop movement that flourished in Los Angeles in the 1990s. This was followed by a series of television music documentaries which included My Mic Sounds Nice (2010) which aired on BET.

DuVernay's first narrative feature film, I Will Follow (2010), secured her the African American Film Critics Association award for best screenplay. Her follow-up, Middle of

Nowhere (2012) won the Best Director Prize at the 2012 Sundance film festival, making her the first African-American woman to receive the award.

All proceeds will go towards the construction of the ESCTT's Bro Tracy Wilson Information Centre.