“There’s something very important about films about black women and girls being made by black women,” Ava DuVernay said last year. “It’s a reflection as opposed to an interpretation.” A film director and distributor, and a black woman, her films are essentially love letters to women who look like me. She is a much-needed talent in Hollywood, a corrective in a world that sorely needs auteurs who are not old white men.
I first heard of her a few years back, when she made I Will Follow, a film about grief. Then there was her 2012 follow-up, Middle Of Nowhere. That’s when I fell in love with her work: it is clean, thoughtful and tells stories that are rarely told. The film follows Ruby, a medical student whose husband is in prison, and it won her praise, plus the director’s award at the Sundance Film Festival (she was the first black woman to win it). Now there is Oscar buzz for her latest film, Selma, about the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches led by Martin Luther King Jr, starring Oprah Winfrey and David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr.
The best thing about DuVernay is her directness. In a keynote speech at the Film Independent Forum , she talked about the “coat of desperation” that film-makers often wear – all the industry networking that ends up repelling creativity: “All of that focus to extract from other people is distracting you from what you’re doing.” At 42, she had a relatively late start in film-making – she’s been doing it for less than five years – and is making up for lost time. She has a delightful Twitter feed, dispensing wisdom and activism in equal measure. She’s blazing a trail, and doing it so lightly. See you at the Oscars, Ava.
• Follow Bim on Twitter
