The RCC Diversity Programming Board is proud to bring you a special event next month in celebration of Women’s History Month: a private screening of the film “Origin” written and directed by the talented auteur Ava DuVernay and based on the best-selling book “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson. The screening will be held from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday, March 9 at the Varsity Theatre in Ashland.
If you would like to join us, please complete this form so we can let the theater know how many attendees to expect. You can learn more about the author and filmmaker below and watch the trailer online.
We hope you can join us!
For more information, contact Lucia Bartscher at LBartscher@roguecc.edu.
About Ava DuVernay
Ava DuVernay is an American filmmaker, screenwriter and film and television producer. She is a recipient of a Primetime Emmy Award, two NAACP Image Awards, a BAFTA Film Award and a BAFTA TV Award, as well as a nominee of an Academy Award and Golden Globe. In 2011, she founded her independent distribution company ARRAY.
After making her directorial debut with “I Will Follow” (2010), DuVernay 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), a biopic about Martin Luther King Jr., DuVernay became the first African-American woman to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director. The film went on to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Her other film credits include the Academy Award-nominated Netflix documentary “13th” (2016) and the Disney fantasy film “A Wrinkle in Time” (2018), the latter making her the first African-American woman to direct a film with a budget of $100 million.
Her television credits include the OWN drama series “Queen Sugar” (2016) and two Netflix drama limited series: “When They See Us” (2019), based on the 1989 Central Park jogger case and “Colin in Black & White” (2021), based on the teenage years of NFL player Colin Kaepernick.
In 2017, DuVernay was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2020, she was elected to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences board of governors as part of the directors’ branch.
About Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the author of “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” (2010) and “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
Wilkerson was the editor-in-chief of the Howard University college newspaper, interned at the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, and became the Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times. She also taught at Emory, Princeton, Northwestern and Boston University.
Wilkerson interviewed over a thousand people for “The Warmth of Other Suns,” which documents the stories of African Americans who migrated to northern and western cities during the 20th century. Her book “Caste” describes the racial hierarchy in the United States as a caste system. Both books were best-sellers.