Oscar-nominated director Ava DuVernay is claiming that black filmmakers get discouraged from entering international film festivals because people outside the United States don’t care about their stories.
DuVernay — director of the Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma and various Netflix prestige projects, who walked away from lucrative first-look deals with both Spotify and Warner Bros. — lamented her lot in life as a black filmmaker, that she was repeatedly discouraged from applying to film festivals because she “wouldn’t get in.”
“For black filmmakers, we’re told that people who love films in other parts of the world don’t care about our stories and don’t care about our films,” DuVernay said at the Venice Film Festival, according to a report by the Guardian.
“This is something that we are often told: you cannot play international film festivals, no one will come,” the director added.
Ava DuVernay attends a red carpet for the movie “Origin” at the 80th Venice International Film Festival on September 06, 2023. (Stefania D’Alessandro/WireImage)
This year, DuVernay became the first black woman to compete with a feature-length film at Venice.
“People will not come to the press conferences, people won’t come to the [press and industry] screenings,” DuVernay continued. “They will not be interested in selling tickets. You might not even get into this festival, don’t apply. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told, ‘Don’t apply to Venice, you won’t get in. It won’t happen.’”
“And this year, something happened that hadn’t happened in eight decades before: an African-American woman in competition,” she added. “So now that’s a door open that I trust and hope the festival will keep open.”
DuVernay’s movie, Origin, premiered at the film festival on Wednesday. It reportedly focuses on racism in the United States and was adapted from Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction book Caste.
DuVernay supports abortion, which kills hundreds of thousands of black children every year (about one-third of the women seeking a recorded 600,000+ abortions per year are black), suppressing the voice of black Americans in the U.S. electoral system.
As Breitbart entertainment editor Jerome Hudson noted in his first book, 50 Things They Don’t Want You to Know, more black pregnancies ended in abortion than live birth from 2012 to 2016, according to a New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene study.
Moreover, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) noted in 2014 that 78 percent of babies aborted in New York City in 2011 were either black or Hispanic.
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