DuVernay's '14th' Premieres a Decade After '13th' — SkimNews
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- Ava DuVernay premiered her documentary "14th" at the New York Film Festival's closing night, exactly ten years after her Oscar-nominated "13th" opened the same festival in 2016.
- DuVernay originally pitched the film to Netflix docs head Adam Del Deo as a birthright-citizenship documentary before Trump's 2024 re-election, then broadened it to all five sections of the 14th Amendment as executive orders landed one by one during production.
- The project's final piece fell into place when Trump created an insurrection fund for January 6 rioters, which DuVernay and legal scholar Sherrilyn Ifill connected in the film to the amendment's obscure public debt clause — the section even historian Eric Foner had to look up in his pocket Constitution.
- DuVernay sent 326 interview requests to sitting Republican congresspersons, senators, governors, and major-city mayors; only a handful agreed, with former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake as the highest-ranking conservative in the documentary.
- DuVernay used AI-powered restoration tools from Asteria Film Co. on degraded archival photos from the Library of Congress, Smithsonian, and private family albums, then applied a stereoscopic technique — pairing restored images with rotoscoping and slight animation — to make flat historical photos appear three-dimensional.
- The director replaced the on-screen lyric breaks from "13th" with stand-up comedy segments, anchored by a Paul Mooney clip she calls her 'laugh so much' moment; DuVernay frames comedians as 'the only ones' who can 'pierce through' partisan media silos.
Why it matters: DuVernay's film functions as real-time documentation of constitutional erosion — each Trump executive order supplied footage, with the January 6 rioter slush fund completing the 14th Amendment's public debt clause mid-production. Her 326 rejected interview requests from Republicans expose a political establishment unwilling to publicly defend the constitutional provisions it has already voted to weaken, leaving the film's argument unopposed on screen.
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