ORIGIN
USA, 2023 Director Ava DuVernay Starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash-Betts, Vera Farmiga, Audra McDonald, Nick Offerman, Blair Underwood, Connie Nielsen, Emily Yancy, Jasmine Cephas-Jones, Finn Wittock, Victoria Pedretti, Isha Blaaker Running time 130′
Isabel Wilkerson may be an unfamiliar name to most, but many will indeed discover her after this 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival. She is a journalist, writer, and the first African-American woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize, one of the most prestigious, if not the most prestigious, awards for those involved in journalism (and also literature and music, to be precise and complete). Wilkerson won the Pulitzer in 1994. She worked for the New York Times at that time and was the chief editor of the Chicago newsroom. The story that gave her the prize was about the catastrophic flooding that hit a vast area in the Midwest. The piece, in particular, told the story of a ten-year-old boy who was responsible for his four younger siblings despite his very young age. It was a story about American society outside the big cities, a texture made of men and women who keep that boundless country alive but often live in desperate conditions and are forgotten by the government.
Ava DuVernay, the director of Selma, the film chronicling one of the pivotal events in Reverend Martin Luther King’s battle for civil rights and against segregation, tells in Origin the story of Isabel Wilkerson, a pioneer for the entire African-American community that a militant artist like DuVernay could not ignore. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Wilkerson. She was Will Smith’s wife in King Richard, and soon we’ll be one of the talents to bring on screen the long-awaited new version of The Color Purple. Accompanying Aunjanue in this biopic is a top-notch cast consisting of Jon Bernthal (the two had already worked together in King Richard), Niecy Nash-Betts, Vera Farmiga, Nick Offerman, Blair Underwood, and Connie Nielsen. Origin runs for the Golden Lion by telling the story of a woman who unhinged one of the WASP fiefdoms. It is one of the many victories brought home since 1965, the year of the Selma march, by Reverend King, in the name of love.
