Film Screening:

13th 

(Ava DuVernay, 2016, 100 min, USA, in English, Color, Digital)  

-- In conjunction with the exhibition, Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush, at the Nasher Museum of Art!

Ava DuVernay's 13th is a documentary about how the Thirteenth Amendment led to mass incarceration in the United States, but it's also a gorgeous, evocative, and maddening exploration of words: of their power, their roots, their permanence. It's about those who wield those words and those made to kneel by them. Many Americans by now are familiar with the coded language of the country's racial hegemony. Some shun certain words while others make anthems out of them.

The film opens with an analysis of the eponymous amendment: “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.” 13th then spends over an hour and a half tracing the path from the clause between those two commas to the 2.2 million prisoners in the American justice system. 

"Manages to capture the depth and insidiousness of more than a century of cultural, societal and economic oppression along racial lines and then condenses it into a brisk 100-minute package that could literally slip right into your pocket." - Oliver Jones, New York Observer 

"13th ... is dense with information, and it moves fast. But it's also a story told in images, and the ones DuVernay has chosen ring not just with sadness and horror but also cautious optimism."- Stephanie Zacharek, TIME Magazine

Cost: Free and open to the public.

Sponsors: The Nasher Museum of Art and the Program in Arts of the Moving Image (AMI).