WWhen I ask Ava DuVernay how she kept her focus while making her new film — or how everyone does, when the onslaught of news, fake news, and controversial facts seems designed to overwhelm us — she begins to answer, then stops. Her eyes filled with tears.
“I got emotional when you said that, because it was the movie that saved me,” she said. “It’s been a very difficult couple of years. I live in Los Angeles, and I’ve seen people in my neighborhood get out of their cars. The lady selling flowers next to my office was there one day, and the next day she wasn’t there. People that I know personally are literally hiding in their houses, like Anne Frank… So when I felt rage and fear, I put it into the film… And I just… I did something.”
The film that saved DuVernay, called 14th, requires a bit of history to explain. In early 1864, with the Civil War raging on the battlefields of Jonesville, Virginia, and Dandridge, Tennessee, and President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address still echoing across the country, work began on what would become the first addition to the U.S. Constitution in 61 years. The 13th Amendment ended slavery, with one exception, “as punishment for crime,” and thus a loophole was created that—as Ava DuVernay’s 2016 Oscar-nominated documentary The 13th explores—has enabled the continued oppression of Black Americans to this day.
Now, 10 years after the 13th In his published version, DuVernay has made another gripping documentary exploring how another Reconstruction-era constitutional amendment, written in pursuit of this “more perfect union,” came under sustained attack. A sequel of sorts, then – even if 13th isn’t the kind of film you’d expect to spawn a franchise. “Oh no. I never thought I’d make it 14th until I heard they were trying to undo birthright citizenship,” DuVernay says, referring to President Trump’s January 2025 executive order. “I mean, one of the foundations of America is if you’re born in America, you’re an American. Now that was going to change? Just the audacity and absurdity of that pushed me to dig deeper into how we got here.”
For a full year, she thought she was making a film about birthright citizenship, the first and most well-known of the five sections of the 14th Amendment, but as DuVernay traveled the country, meeting with experts and conducting more in-depth research, the plan changed. “We started to see that, systematically, the other parts were also being attacked. It looked like such a useful design, that I thought there was something here…”
At 54 years old, with eight feature films, six television shows and numerous prestigious awards to her credit, Ava DuVernay is a recognized leader in the film industry and a Black American icon, who counts Oprah Winfrey and the Obamas among her friends. She looks the part too, dressed today in a blue Oxford shirt and fitted taupe trousers; her nails short but manicured and her hair styled in immaculate waist-length locks. She could pass for a senator, exuding warmth, engaging eyes and ready answers to difficult questions.
DuVernay’s work has always been fueled by a burning sense of justice. After graduating from UCLA, she interned at CBS News and then worked in public relations for many years before becoming a filmmaker. 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 the Academy Award for Best Picture. She followed it up with another Oscar nomination, for the 13th, then when they see us, an Emmy Award-winning drama series about a racially motivated miscarriage of justice exacerbated by Trump in 1980s New York.
Some of DuVernay’s accumulated expertise was already on display 10 years ago in 13th, which digested 100 years of American history in 100 compelling minutes, but this new film is his masterpiece. The amount of information he provides and the galvanizing clarity with which he does so is an incredible feat in documentary filmmaking. Not only is the 14th Amendment a more complex and burdensome piece of legislation – memorably described by one contributor as “the bagel of democracy” – but each day in Trump’s United States provides new examples of human rights backsliding and, for those watching closely, a glimpse of a grand strategy behind it.
“People think I’m some kind of legal mind or political junkie,” DuVernay says between sips of hot chocolate. “I’m not. I’m just a regular woman who wants to understand.” This attitude inspired the documentary and its structuring around 50 interviews, which she conducted personally. They include famous New York congresswoman Alexandria “AOC” Ocasio-Cortez, the Internet’s favorite socialist sex symbol Hasan Piker, and David W Blight, a Yale professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of several impressive works on slavery and the Civil War.
But what is even more remarkable than the quantity and quality is the diversity. We hear, as one would expect, from historians and constitutionalists, but also – as one would expect not expect — from a 22-year-old livestreamer: “I wanted the whole ideological spectrum,” DuVernay says, nodding vigorously when I mention some of the more surprising names. “And it’s not just Republican and Democrat; far right, far left. We have all of that, but it’s also generational. Dean Withers (the streamer) and his generation see things much differently than David Blight… Or do they?”
The conservative perspective is expressed by figures such as Anna Paulina Luna, a Mexican-American congresswoman defending ICE, who argues that – contrary to the 14th Amendment – immigrants are not right to due process. The author, Dr Donald Critchlow, at one point advances the favorite canard of the “lost causes” revisionists: that Confederate General Robert E Lee was not a slave owner (he was, and this claim is quickly verified). Meanwhile, the staunchly Republican, but never Maga, view is represented by US senator turned ambassador to Türkiye, Jeff Flake.
DuVernay says she has “a lot of respect” for all three and regrets not including more shades of conservative thought in the film. It’s not for lack of trying, though. More than 300 requests were sent to “every sitting member of Congress, every sitting senator, every sitting Republican governor, every sitting Republican mayor of a major city,” making it clear that there was no intention to embarrass or even debate the contributors. Yet only a handful said yes. Why is she so camera shy? “To me, this really speaks to the Republicans’ strategic choice to preach to the choir. These are not conversations that they see any reason to have outside of a certain sphere.”
And even though all men are created equal (according to another founding document of the United States), not all Netflix documentaries interviewed are. DuVernay’s film shows clear favoritism toward prominent jurist Sherrilyn Ifill, of whom we hear the first and most in the film. It makes sense: Ifill is the woman who founded the 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy at Howard University in Washington DC in 2025. She is “the Meryl Streep of the 14th,” says an impressed DuVernay, “the great lady of it. I talked to him for six hours straight. I was just fascinated by her.
DuVernay became aware of Ifill and her work during Trump’s second presidential campaign, when the law professor was part of a small group trying to call attention to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and its relevance, following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Section 3 bars from holding office any person who “has ever taken an oath…to support the Constitution of the United States (and subsequently) engaged in insurrection or rebellion against it” (attempts to disqualify Trump on these grounds were effectively stopped by a 2024 Supreme Court decision).
DuVernay admits she didn’t take Ifill seriously at the time. “I even remember thinking, ‘Hmmm, she’s a little crazy,’” she says. “She was saying on TV, ‘Use Section 3 of the 14th Amendment!’ And it was like, “Look at this crazy girl! » A few other people have said it – David Blight, I think, wrote an article – but it really was considered a very foreign view. Now you look back and say, “What were we doing?” » » Section 3 was written with former Confederates in mind. “We had been through this before and we forgot about it,” DuVernay says, before correcting himself. “Or had we forgotten? Or had we (this story) been deliberately left aside?”
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The deep admiration that DuVernay now feels for Ifill is evident in the film: “I just wanted to put the camera so close and she goes – ‘Uh… that’s Really close!” Ifill and many other participants are also interviewed amid the imposing columns, marbles, and monuments of campus or federal buildings, perhaps implying that people—as much as neoclassical architecture—can embody democratic values and serve as ballast against their wanton destruction.
This idea is further explored by the story of Devon “the Statue Killer” Henry, the only entrepreneur brave enough to remove Confederate monuments -…
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