Thought-provoking film continues through Feb. 22 at Varsity Theatre

By Art Van Kraft for Ashland.news

A controversial  film about newly discovered theories of racial and cultural injustice premiered at the Varsity Theatre to a sold-out audience Saturday night.

The film “Origin” was written and directed by Ava DuVernay and chronicles the “tragedy and triumph” of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s book “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents.” 

The film takes a three-country tour in an attempt to link the repercussions of American slavery to the crimes of the Holocaust and to India’s caste system, a theory that has caused considerable reexamining of modern history. 

The book, as well as the movie adaption, investigates similarities in prejudice and exclusion in different cultures worldwide — a scenario the author calls “a global phenomenon of epic proportion.” 

The movie was presented by Ashland Together, a group dedicated to racial justice from education to volunteering to hosting important conversations. Hillary Larson, is one of the group’s cofounders, stood in the aisle helping people find seats as the theater filled up.

“It was something about how quickly the movie sold out in a day and a half,” Larson said. “It means that there are more people coming together that want to connect and understand. It makes me think about people in eastern Oregon who are thinking about seceding from this part of the state. I think about them and how they feel excluded. We can help solve that by being in communication with people we feel are over there or below in some way.”

Larson says those conversations might help to bridge social, cultural, and economic divides. 

“This film in particular shows what it means to welcome and what does it means to exclude … it brought that even closer to home for me.”

Larson said that many people questioned the logic behind Wilkerson’s thesis, but the evidence she discovered in her travels to Germany put forward a thesis that Hitler’s “Final Solution” was borrowed from American slavery.

The questions and answer discussion period after the screening was moderated by Candace La Tia, a local performance artist, nature advocate and founder of One Space, A True Nature Advocacy, a performance art and social practices organization. 

“Racial equity is an intense area. Because the panel are all filmmakers, I was invited to help honor the experience in a different way,” La Tia said. “This is a very emotional process with a lot of trauma involved, we didn’t want to glaze over that part of it and go straight to the intellectualizing.”

Two panelists appeared onstage before the film. Vaun Monroe is an assistant professor of Digital Cinema at SOU’s Media and Cinema program. He said he’s passionate about inclusion and hearing the voices of Black and brown people in the traditionally white field of cinema.  He pointed out the need for empathy and the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes, something the film emphasizes. 

“What we saw with (film director) Ava is a sophisticated technique that avoids what is called ‘trauma porn,'” Monroe said. “It’s when the focus is on the atrocity and you actually force the people who have been damaged by the trauma to relive it in the film. Is this the best way to deal with this subject matter or is there another way? What we saw with Ava’s film is her use of a sophisticated technique, so she doesn’t show all the time what happens, she’ll walk you up to the moment (of atrocity) and move on. That’s a conscious choice she’s making in an attempt to not retraumatize the audience.”

Courtney Williams is a writer-director-producer who taught film production at SOU who says she exemplifies stories that focus on ideas of gender roles and social conventions.  

“The film is a light that is brought into the emotional realm of each person’s individual story,” Williams said. “Ava brings us all into those individual times and places and you get to know those people and those scenarios, and we don’t have to know the connection and the matrix of everything until the end of the movie.”  

“One of the things that makes this film exceptional is that she funded this film independently,” Williams continued. “She went to foundations and individuals to fund a $38 million film that was shot on three continents in 37 days. She made an independent model for a film outside the studios.”

At the end of the film, moviegoers streamed out of the theater and into the lobby, filling it with conversations. Delvin Williams stood quietly in a corner watching the crowd. He was wearing a turban, which he said signifies Moorish knowledge. 

“The movie was amazing, they had a wonderful sense of being,” Williams said. “That’s the best way I can describe it. Now that we know racism happens in these ways, what is the solution? I’m excited to see change now.” 

“It started some conversations that some people were uncomfortable having,” Williams added. “Like the comparison between the Jewish people and the slaves. There were differences but similarities, but the end goal is to see the truth. The movie opens a few doors and started some conversations that were uncomfortable having.  Are we still in the prison but we just can’t see the bars?”

Art Van Kraft is an artist living in Ashland and a former broadcast journalist and news director of a Los Angeles-area National Public Radio affiliate. Email him at [email protected].