Origin (2024)
Directed by Ava Duvernay
Written by Ava Duvernay
Starring Anjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Vera Farmiga, Isha Blaaker
Release Date January 25th, 2024
Published January 25th, 2024
Origin is a big project. Adapting a non-fiction story tracking the origin of racial discrimination via the history of the caste system worldwide, is not an easy task. It's a roiling beast of a project that director Ava Duvernay is perhaps the only filmmaker could attempt to tame and tease into a familiar film drama. The book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, a bestseller for writer Isabel Wilkerson, is a deeply academic, research heavy effort that is far from the most natural book to be turned into a dramatic feature film. Director Ava Duvernay had to give a dramatic shape to the story and she found that shape in the author's life story.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor stars in Origin as Isabel Wilkerson, an author struggling with the idea for her next book. She wants to chart the origin of racism in America but her research slowly takes her in a new direction. What she finds is that racism isn't as simple as white people hating black people, though that is a big part of it. Rather, the true roots of racism are often economic in nature. The need for a class of people who exist to do the work that others don't wish to do leads to the owning class to create a caste system in which particular members of a culture are chosen to be that class of people who will perform tasks.
Leaders in these cultures quickly realized that they could create the workers they needed by exploiting racial and religious differences. Demonizing people for the color of their skin or by the difference in their religious beliefs proved to be an effective way to find a cheap, pliable workforce, groups of people who have no option but to accept poor treatment, low wages, and terrible working conditions, just for the chance to survive. Thus, confronting racial differences required more than overcoming a specific prejudice based on color, it requires dismantling economic systems that have been constructed over hundreds of years that thrived off of this forced labor based on discrimination.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media.
