Screenwriter, producer, director and Golden Globe-nominee Ava DuVernay is back with a new miniseries that’s about to drop on Netflix – When They See Us.
The hotly anticipated four-part miniseries has been written and directed by Ava DuVernay, and it’ll be dropping on Netflix today, 31 May.
It will follow the true story of a 1985 case in which five teenagers of colour, who since became known as the Central Park Five, were wrongly convicted of a rape they didn’t commit, and spent terms of between six and 13 years in prison.
As we count the seconds until we get a chance to tune in to what will surely be an emotional roller coaster, here’s a closer look at DuVernay and her groundbreaking career so far.
Ava DuVernay’s life and career in film and TV
Ava Marie DuVernay, 46, is a director, producer and screenwriter, as well as a film marketer and distributor.
Raised in Lynwood, California, she studied at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she had a double major of English Literature and African-American Studies.
She started her career in journalism, working with the likes of Connie Chung and Dan Rather, which may very well have had something to do with her interest in making an adaptation of the true crime story of the Central Park Five.
However, she said in an interview with UCLA magazine that she eventually ‘became disenchanted with journalism’, and so made the move to film publicity instead – working for the likes of Savoy Pictures and 20th Century Fox, until she eventually set up her own PR firm in 1999, called The DuVernay Agency, which worked on campaigns for movies like The Terminal, Collateral, Spy Kids and Dreamgirls.
Then in 2005, DuVernay took $6,000 (roughly £4,750) to make her first film, which was a short based on her mother’s life called Saturday Night Life.
She then made the switch to documentary filmmaking for a time, believing, as she told Interview magazine: ‘The documentaries were something that I could do for a small amount of money, and then I felt like as long as I found the truth in the stories I was telling as a doc, I could teach myself filmmaking through doc filmmaking.’
So DuVernay then made hip hop documentaries This Is the Life and Compton in C Minor, before making her first feature narrative movie called I Will Follow in 2011, which Roger Ebert called ‘one of the best films I’ve seen about coming to terms with the death of a loved one’.
DuVernay’s second narrative film – which she’d written in 2003 – was Middle of Nowhere, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. For this movie, DuVernay became the first African-American woman to win the U.S. Directing Award: Dramatic.
Then in 2014, she directed Selma, which was based on the 1965 voting rights marches and arguably become her big break as it was nominated for Best Director at the Golden Globes as well as a Best Picture Oscar, and eventually won Best Original Song at the Academy Awards.
DuVernay followed this with the documentary 13th, which takes its title from the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which states that slavery be outlawed unless as a punishment for crime.
This documentary won a Peabody Award and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars in 2017, which made DuVernay the first black woman to ever be nominated as a director in any feature category at the Academy Awards.
From there, DuVernay went on to direct 2018’s A Wrinkle in Time, which made DuVernay the first woman of colour to direct a live-action movie with a budget of over $100 million (close to £80 million).
In late 2018 it was announced that DuVernay was making a Prince documentary for Netflix, which has the blessing of Prince’s estate, who are thought to be providing archival footage interviews and photos to the production team.
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