Grief is complicated, says filmmaker Ava DuVernay (Selma; 13th).
"It is its own life journey that most of us will experience, unfortunately, and you know it has sorrowful moments, but there is also beauty in that journey," she says. "It's all intertwined."
DuVernay was grieving when the inimitable Oprah Winfrey handed her a copy of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson's non-fiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in 2020.
"We were in the midst of a pandemic, I had lost some loved ones and we were dealing, in the United States, with the murder of George Floyd, which was a huge cultural and social event here; a tragedy," DuVernay recalls.
"I didn't feel like reading a 500-page book about some pretty heavy subject matter. I just wasn't in the headspace."
Wilkerson's searing treatise – one of former President Barack Obama's favourite books – posits that the great racial rift in America is as much about brutal caste structures as it is about skin colour. Drawing parallels with India's treatment of the Dalits, or "untouchables", and Nazi persecution of Jewish people, it's a confronting read. After two months, DuVernay picked up and was exhilarated by Wilkerson's theories.
"The idea of caste as being the foundational principle of so many of the -isms that we experience in our lives — whether it's racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism or whatever — the bedrock of all of that is this very fundamental idea that I'm better than you because of this set of random traits and that I will organise society and I will accrue power and status based on that," says DuVernay
"It sparked a fresh way of thinking about old things."
Blurred lines
Channelling her grief through the momentous text, DuVernay decided to turn it into a film. But she approached the material in a fresh way, crafting an intriguing biopic about Wilkerson's fraught experience writing the book.
"I wanted to tell a story about a woman who was a teacher, who is galvanised by this cultural phenomenon and wants to share these ideas with us," DuVernay says.
Three of Wilkerson's family members died while she tackled the thesis.
"This woman was going through great tragedy, the horrors of losing the three closest people to you in your life within a 16-month period. How do you endure?" DuVernay says.
And yet endure Wilkerson does. The remarkable Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor steps into the author's shoes, towering in the central role. She had worked with DuVernay before, starring as Sharonne, the mother of Yusef Salaam, in the director's powerful Netflix miniseries When They See Us, about five real-life Black and Latino teenagers falsely accused of raping a white woman.
"I really needed someone who was going to be an intellectual partner with me, because the subject matter is pretty dense," DuVernay says.
"And if there's one word that I think of when I consider Aunjanue, it's rigour. She's a very disciplined actor, highly intelligent and she gives us a superb performance."
As we follow Wilkerson's inquisitive journey through America's south and on to Berlin and New Dehli, her interviews with experts give way to dramatic re-creations.
Origin opens with the goosebump-inducing last moments of teenager Trayvon Martin, played by Myles Frost. We meet Nazi Party member August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock), who fell in love with and married a Jewish woman, Irma Eckler (Victoria Pedretti), and is the subject of a famous photo in which he refuses to participate in the "Heil Hitler" salute.
Caste-confounding Dalit professor Suraj Yengde plays himself.
"As a documentarian, I like blurring those edges," DuVernay says of casting Yengde. "I was working in the narrative form, but there are some documentary-esque textures."
Love stories
Both DuVernay and Wilkerson make sense of the world through their work.
"This time that we're in, it feels intense to us. But there's never been a time when there has not been war, tragedy, sorrow and pain happening somewhere, whether we know about it," DuVernay says.
"Some of my colleagues, like [Dune director] Denis Villeneuve, are futurists. They're thinking about what's ahead and the worlds to come.
"And I want to learn about what we've done and how we can learn from it."
While much of DuVernay's work tackles difficult material, she sees it from another angle.
"When They See Us is about five boys who Donald Trump relegated to being criminals, by taking out a full-page ad to demonise them when they were innocent. He wanted to throw away the key and at one point said that they should be killed," she says.
"But at the end of the four-part series, you see the triumph of overcoming that. That is a joyous journey, for me as a storyteller. It's not a weight. Selma is not a weight. 13th is not a weight.
"It's telling the stories of the triumph of the people who have survived."
To DuVernay, they are love stories.
"Colin in Black & White [about American footballer and activist Colin Kaepernick's high school years] is a love story between him and his parents. When They See Us is a love story about the families that stood by these boys through thick and thin and were ostracised. Selma is about the love of your tribe. Origin is a love story about human connection and addressing grief," she says.
Art connects us all, DuVernay argues: "Whether it's film, literature, music, painting, sculpture or the culinary arts, going home and whoever is there puts love into what they make for you, or what you make for yourself: That's art.
"Art is just the beauty of life, and these are the things that remind us of our humanity."
Origin is in cinemas from April 4.