How DuVernay Built '14th' as Trump Tore Up the Amendment — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Ava DuVernay's "14th" closed the New York Film Festival exactly 10 years after her Oscar-nominated "13th" opened the same festival; she calls the symmetry a "beautiful bookend" but insists the new film is not a sequel, describing it instead as "a puzzle" and a different entry in her constitutional series.
- Originally pitched to Netflix's Adam Del Deo as a birthright citizenship documentary before Trump's 2024 reelection, the project expanded to all five sections of the 14th Amendment as executive orders "ricocheted against current events" during production — "building the plane while you're flying," per DuVernay.
- DuVernay structured the film around a star symbolizing the 14th Amendment being "ripped away" clause by clause; she struggled to incorporate the obscure Reconstruction-era public-debt provision until Trump's January 6 "insurrection fund" suddenly made it the final, completing rip — confirmed by legal expert Sherrilyn Ifill on a frantic phone call.
- DuVernay sent 326 interview requests to sitting Republican congresspersons, senators, governors, and major-city mayors; former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake was the highest-ranking conservative who agreed to appear, and the film drew from across the spectrum with both Anna Paulina Luna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez participating.
- "14th" uses stand-up comedy clips — including the late Paul Mooney — as breathing room between dense sections, replacing the music-lyrics-on-screen technique of "13th"; DuVernay argues comedians are the only figures who can "pierce through" today's partisan media camps because everyone else is stuck in their own.
- DuVernay filmed former Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden inside the Library of Congress "shortly before she had been fired by the Trump administration," and follows Confederate monument-removal contractor Devon Henry; the film's stereoscopic archival animation was designed by Monuments Lab's William Roy Hodgson working from his New York apartment.
Why it matters: DuVernay frames the 14th Amendment's erosion as a coordinated project — each executive order targeting a different clause — and the 326 refused GOP interview requests prove that even a Netflix-backed, festival-headlining documentary couldn't crack the conservative participation barrier on a constitutional question. With Carla Hayden's firing captured on film, '14th' also serves as a contemporaneous record of the Trump administration's personnel war on federal cultural institutions.
Ask SkimNews
