Aunjanue Ellis

Image: NetflixLOGLINE: Orion seems a lot like your average elementary school kid—shy, unassuming, harboring a secret crush. But underneath his seemingly normal exterior, Orion is a ball of adolescent anxiety, completely consumed by irrational fears of bees, dogs, the ocean, cellphone waves, murderous gutter clowns, even falling off a cliff. But of all his fears, the thing he’s the most afraid of is what he confronts on a nightly basis: the dark. So when the literal embodiment of his worst fear pays a visit, Dark whisks…

For Ava DuVernay, whose projects like 13th, Selma, and When They See Us challenge viewers to contend with the gut-wrenching racism that’s colored American history, Origin provides a more global perspective on racial inequality and its foundation within social hierarchies.    “I try to make soul food with my movies, not junk food, not fast food,” DuVernay tells Rolling Stone. “Not stuff that goes in and goes straight up the next day, but stuff that sticks to your ribs.”  Origin, which DuVernay wrote and…

It is a truth universally acknowledged (or at least it should be by now) that America is a country founded upon — as well as cursed, colonized, and fertilized by — a bedrock of racism that continues to this day. Should you be unable to wrap your head around that in 2024, we’re not sure what to say to you. But to chalk up modern social inequity and state-sanctioned violence against certain communities to being “merely” a racially-biased phenomenon and simply leave it at that is insufficient. There’s something deeper…

Trauma is inescapable in the first trailer for Origin, Ava DuVernay‘s forthcoming film chronicling Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson as she sits in generation-spanning grief to write the haunting book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The film hits theaters Jan. 19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAweg5PaMuw “If you look closely, you can see something tragic is happening,” Wilkerson, portrayed by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, states in the trailer. As she speaks from a podium, the image of…