When I ask Ava DuVernay how she kept her focus while making her new film – or how anyone does, when the onslaught of news, fake news and disputed facts seems designed to overwhelm – she starts to answer, then stops. Her eyes have filled with tears.
“I just got emotional, as you said that, because it was the film that saved me,” she says. “It’s been a very tough two years. I live in Los Angeles, and I’ve seen people in my neighbourhood pulled out of their cars. The lady who sells flowers next to my office was there one day, and the next day she wasn’t. People I know personally are literally hiding in their houses, like Anne Frank vibes … So when I would feel the rage and the fear, I put it into the film … And I just … I was doing something.”
The film that saved DuVernay, titled 14th, takes a little history to explain. In early 1864, as the civil war raged on in the battlefields of Jonesville, Virginia and Dandridge, Tennessee, and with President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address still ringing out across the nation, work began on what would become the first addition to the US constitution for 61 years. The 13th amendment ended slavery, with one exception, “as a punishment for crime”, and thus a loophole was created, which – as explored in 13th, Ava DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated documentary of 2016 – has allowed for the continued oppression of Black Americans to this day.
Now, 10 years on from 13th’srelease, DuVernay has made another rousing documentary exploring how a different Reconstruction-era constitutional amendment, drafted in pursuit of that “more perfect union”, has come under sustained attack. A sequel of sorts, then – though 13th is hardly the sort of film you’d expect to birth a franchise. “Oh no. I never thought I’d do 14th until I heard they were trying to rescind birthright citizenship,” says DuVernay, referring to President Trump’s executive order of January 2025. “I mean, one of the bedrocks of America is that if you were born in America, you’re an American. Now it was going to change? Just the sheer audacity and absurdity of that propelled me to look deeper into how we got here.”
For a full year she thought she was making a film about birthright citizenship, the first and best known of the 14th amendment’s five sections, but as DuVernay travelled the country, meeting experts and conducting further research, the plan changed. “We started to see that, systematically, the other parts were also being attacked. It felt like such a design, so purposeful, that I thought there’s something here …”
At 54, and with eight feature films, six TV shows and numerous prestigious awards to her name, Ava DuVernay is an established film industry leader and a Black American icon, who counts Oprah Winfrey and the Obamas among her friends. She looks the part too, dressed today in an Oxford blue shirt and tailored taupe trousers; her nails short but manicured, and her hair styled in pristine, waist-length locs. She could pass for a senator, exuding warmth with engaging eyes and ready answers to tough questions.
DuVernay’s work has always been powered by a fiery sense of justice. After graduating from UCLA, she interned at CBS News, then worked in PR for many years before becoming a film-maker. Her 2014 feature film Selma was, incredibly, the first Hollywood biopic made about civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, and also the first film directed by a Black woman to be nominated for a best picture Oscar. She followed up with another Oscar nomination, for 13th, then When They See Us, an Emmy-winning drama series about a racially charged, Trump-exacerbated miscarriage of justice in 1980s New York.
Some of DuVernay’s accumulated expertise was already on show 10 years ago in 13th, which digested 100 years of American history into 100 cogent minutes, but this new film is her masterpiece. The sheer amount of information it delivers, and the galvanising clarity with which it does so, add up to an astounding feat of documentary film-making. Not only is the 14th amendment a more complex and unwieldy piece of legislation – memorably described by one contributor as “the everything bagel of democracy” – but every day in Trump’s US provides fresh examples of the human rights rollback and, for those watching closely, glimpses of an overarching strategy behind it.
“People think I’m some kind of legal mind or political junkie,” says DuVernay, between sips of hot chocolate. “I’m not. I’m just a regular lady who wants to understand.” This attitude informed the documentary and its structuring round 50 interviews, every one of which she conducted personally. Those featured include celebrity New York congresswoman Alexandria “AOC” Ocasio-Cortez, the internet’s favourite socialist sex symbol Hasan Piker, and David W Blight, Yale professor and the Pulitzer prize-winning author of several impressive tomes on slavery and the civil war.
But what’s even more notable than the quantity and quality is the diversity. We hear, as you might expect, from historians and constitutional experts, but also – as you might not expect – from a 22-year-old livestreamer: “I wanted the full ideological spectrum,” says DuVernay, nodding vigorously when I mention some of the more surprising names. “And that’s not just Republican and Democrat; far-right, far-left. We have all that, but it’s also generational. Dean Withers [the streamer] and his generation are thinking of it much differently than David Blight is … Or are they?”
The conservative perspective is articulated by figures including Anna Paulina Luna, a Mexican-American, ICE-defending congresswoman, who argues that – contrary to the 14th amendment – immigrants aren’t entitled to due process. The author Dr Donald Critchlow at one point forwards that favourite canard of “lost cause” revisionists: that the Confederate general Robert E Lee was not a slave owner (he was, and this claim is swiftly factchecked). Meanwhile, the staunch Republican-but-never-Maga viewpoint is represented by US senator turned ambassador to Turkey Jeff Flake.
DuVernay says she has “a lot of respect” for all three, and regrets she didn’t include more shades of conservative thought in the film. Not for lack of trying, though. More than 300 requests went out to “every sitting congressperson, every sitting senator, every sitting Republican governor, every sitting Republican mayor of a major city”, making clear there was no intention to embarrass or even debate contributors. Still, only a handful said yes. Why so camera-shy? “To me, it really speaks to the strategic choice by Republicans to preach to the choir. These are not conversations they see any reason to have outside a certain sphere.”
And while all men are created equal (according to another of the US’s founding documents), all Netflix documentary interviewees are not. DuVernay’s filmevinces clear favouritism towards the prominent legal scholar Sherrilyn Ifill, whom we hear from first and most in the film. That’s logical: Ifill is the woman who in 2025 founded the 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy at Howard University, Washington DC. She’s “the Meryl Streep of 14th”, says an awed DuVernay, “the grande dame of it. I talked to her for six hours straight. I was just riveted by her.”
DuVernay became aware of Ifill and her work during Trump’s second presidential campaign, when the law professor was among a small group trying to draw attention to section 3 of the 14th amendment and its relevance, after the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol. Section 3 bars from office anyone who’s “previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States [and then] engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same” (attempts to disqualify Trump on these grounds were effectively shut down by a 2024 supreme court ruling).
DuVernay admits she didn’t take Ifill seriously back then. “I even remember thinking: ‘Hmmm, she’s a little kooky,’” she says. “She was coming out on television saying: ‘Use section 3 of the 14th amendment!’ And it was like: ‘Look at this crazy lady!’ There were a few other people saying it – David Blight, I believe, wrote a piece – but it was truly seen as a very outsider take. Now you just look back and you’re like: ‘What were we doing?’” Section 3 was written with former Confederates in mind. “We had been through this before and forgotten,” says DuVernay, before correcting herself. “Or had we forgotten? Or had [this history] been purposely put to the side?”
The deep admiration DuVernay now feels for Ifill is evident in the film: “I just wanted to put the camera so close and she’s like – “Um … it’s really close!” Ifill and many of the other participants are also interviewed amid the imposing columns, marble and monuments of campus or federal buildings, implying, perhaps, that people – just as much as neoclassical architecture – can embody democratic values and act as ballast against their wanton destruction.
That idea is further explored by the story of Devon “the Statue Slayer” Henry, the lone contractor brave enough to remove Confederate monuments – that is, essentially, pro-slavery monuments – from public places across the south, at the official behest of local government. DuVernay’s documentary also utilises and examines the power of pop culture in other forms, with music from Kendrick Lamar and Fleetwood Mac, clips from 1939’s Gone With the Wind, and standup routines from George Carlin and Paul Mooney. “I don’t see the comedians as much different than the monuments,” says DuVernay. “In that there’s this commemorative landscape all around us, which signposts what to think and carries messages through time.”
Another, potentially more controversial technique in the filmwas jointly inspired by a moving camera illusion known as “the Ken Burns effect” and some 19th-century stereoscopic photography DuVernay saw at the Smithsonian. It involves using traditional animation and AI to bring archive photography vividly to life, and it’s incredibly effective. It’s also, on occasion, deeply moving, particularly with regard to images of Black American life in the Reconstruction era. This is the often forgotten – or deliberately obscured – period from 1865 to 1877, when the provisions of the 14th amendment allowed previously enslaved people to take elected office and build thriving businesses and communities. All this was then brutally destroyed by a decades-long backlash of white supremacist violence characterised by public lynchings, massacres and Ku Klux Klan arson attacks, referred to by historians as “the Nadir”.
The brief, shining promise of Reconstruction is powerfully conveyed in DuVernay’s film, but the use of AI is contentious in Hollywood. Concerns about the technology prompted some of the town’s longest ever labour strikes in 2023, and many big names have publicly spoken out, for and against. Did that aspect give her pause? “No, because we didn’t do any prompting. We didn’t say: ‘Hey Claude, make up some people in the civil war for us.’ It’s all real images that we were moving. Right now, people have a real allergy to AI. I do too. I think it’s dangerous. I’m also sober enough to know it’s embedded in [editing software] Pro Tools, Avid and Resolve … Every film-maker is using it, unfortunately.”
And if it comes down to ends justifying means, then these “ends” could hardly be more dire. “I think America is sitting in a dark, dangerous room and you can’t get out of a room if you can’t see the door or where the furniture is. All I’m trying to do is just turn on a little light. It’s not a big light, it’s not the overhead. It’s a little something to get you around these obstacles and to an exit.”
This is true, she says, not just for African Americans, but for all Americans. And not just for Americans, but for the rest of the world, too. “Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere and we know where it leads. There’s no country that hasn’t been touched by this at some point in its own history. We just need to remember. And so the hope is that this film could be not a lesson, but a reminder.”
What Ava DuVernay has done with 14th is turn the light on. Now it’s up to others to make a move towards the door marked “freedom”. “And I really think that’s what I would tell people to do,” she concludes. “You may not be a film-maker, but, if it’s just on your block, talking to your neighbour – do something.”
14th is in cinemas from 27 November, and on Netflix from 4 December.
