Origin

 

Ava DuVernay's Origin takes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson's personal journey of discovery, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent -- which sought to reframe public conversations and explorations around race and inequality -- and transforms it into a motion picture of singular beauty and brilliance. 

The film, which features a tremendous cast led by the amazing Aunjunue Ellis-Taylor, is poetic and painful -- so painful -- fiercely intelligent, compassionate and analytical, factual and metaphorical, intimate and global, historical and pressingly relevant. 

It's a sermon, a dissertation, an indictment, and a love story. It is so many things, but perhaps foremost, it is a cinematic triumph. DuVernay's best work yet.

I'll leave it at that and urge everyone to see and don't resist its message -- even if that were possible. Let it move you and bruise you and, finally, give you hope.