Film centered on race in the United States criminal justice system.
America makes up 5% of the world's population, yet locks up 25% of the world's prisoners. Ava DuVernay's #13TH explores how we got here.

The title of Ava DuVernay's extraordinary and galvanizing documentary 13TH refers to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States." The progression from that second qualifying clause to the horrors of mass criminalization and the sprawling American prison industry is laid out by DuVernay with bracing lucidity. With a potent mixture of archival footage and testimony from a dazzling array of activists, politicians, historians, and formerly incarcerated women and men (including Angela Davis, Cory Booker and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Jelani Cobb, Khalil G. Muhammad, Michelle Alexander, Van Jones, Malkia Cyril, Bryan Stevenson, Newt Gingrich, Charlie Rangel, and Grover Norquist), DuVernay creates a work of grand historical synthesis.

A film by Ava DuVernay

USA, 2016, documentary, 101 min

Streaming on Netflix (Oct 7th, 2016).

Director: Ava DuVernay


2016 | 54th New York Film Festival - NYFF 2016
* Opening film
* Screening : 30 sept. 2016