Origin is out in theatres now, and while the film didn’t earn any Academy Award nominations, it’s still an enjoyable experience for moviegoers. PopCulture.com spoke to Origin star Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor who has a message for those who have yet to see the movie.
“I think people should have no expectations when they come to see this film,” Ellis-Taylor told PopCulture. “I think they should come being open to what the film is offering and what it’s offering is an invitation to talk about, discuss, argue, disagree with its themes, its argument, the argument that caste is something that unites us all over the world, that we use race as a way to describe our social divisions where in fact, race is a tool of something that is larger.”
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Origin is based on the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. Taylor plays Wilkerson, who is going on a personal journey after suffering major losses in her life. The journalist-turned-author travels to different places in the world to describe racism in the United States as an aspect of a caste system, which is a society-wide system of social stratification. Wilkinson compares the aspects of the experience of American people of color to the caste systems in Nazi Germany and India.
The film is directed by Ava DuVernay who was nominated for an Academy Award and won two Emmy Awards for her documentary film 13th. Ellis-Taylor reunited with DuVernay as they worked together on the 2019 Netflix series When They See Us.
“Ava is a very smart woman,” Ellis-Taylor said about DuVernay. “She’s an intellect herself. So it was good to have someone that I could really spar about the themes of the book. For her, it’s a part of her mission, I think, as a filmmaker. And I think that it is a part of my mission as just a person and as an actor when I can, do a film like Origin. And then I believe that as a part of Ms. Wilkerson’s mission to explore what have become norms in this country that are very, very self-destructive. So it was good to have that someone that I could really talk to, and that matters on a set to be able to talk about the work that you are doing in a real profound way that goes beyond a scene.”
Viewers will likely learn a lot after seeing Origin as it’s a good two-hour history lesson. But Ellis-Taylor doesn’t want viewers to just learn about the past, she wants them “confronting it. You can get a good history lesson, but what do you do about it? And I think that that’s what the film hopefully will be, is a call to action. That’s what I hope.”
