A Decade After '13th,' DuVernay Closes New York Film Festival With '14th'

Ava DuVernay returns to the New York Film Festival on Friday night with a documentary that reframes the question she asked a decade ago, moving from who gets locked up to who gets to belong. ARRAY, the production and advocacy company DuVernay founded, confirmed that "14th," made with Netflix, has its world premiere as the Closing Night selection of the 64th New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall, with DuVernay and several of the film's on-camera participants expected to attend.

The screening closes a festival that opened Sept. 25 with James Gray's "Paper Tiger" and runs through Oct. 12 across venues at Lincoln Center. "14th" draws on more than 50 interviews with historians, lawyers, elected officials and commentators from across the political spectrum, among them Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, former Sen. Jeff Flake, Sen. Alex Padilla, civil-rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill, Stacey Abrams and the Pulitzer Prize-winning historians Eric Foner and David Blight, a lineup confirmed by both TheWrap's account of the festival's announcement and a separate report from The Film Stage. Netflix plans a limited theatrical run in the United States and the United Kingdom beginning Nov. 27, followed one week later by a global streaming premiere on Dec. 4.

A Decade After "13th"

The new film picks up where DuVernay left off ten years ago. "13th," which argued that a clause written into the Thirteenth Amendment's abolition of slavery helped sustain mass incarceration of Black Americans, opened the festival's 54th edition in October 2016, days before its Netflix release, and went on to an Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature and a Primetime Emmy for outstanding documentary. Netflix later made it available for free public screenings outside the platform during the 2020 protests over police violence. "14th" turns to the amendment ratified three years after that one, in 1868. The National Archives' own record of the document notes that it granted citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States," guaranteed due process and equal protection under the law, and effectively nullified the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision, which had denied citizenship to Black Americans.

DuVernay has drawn the line between the two films herself, telling Netflix that the sequel grew out of the first film's unanswered questions.

"If '13th' asked who gets caged, then '14th' asks who gets counted."

She has organized the new film around that single question, with interviewees tracing it from the amendment's ratification during Reconstruction through more than a century and a half of court rulings, legislation and political argument over birthright citizenship and equal protection, according to the ARRAY announcement and to Deadline's report on the project's origins.

A Cast Spanning the Divide

The roster is unusual for a DuVernay project in that it places officeholders from both parties in the same film. Ocasio-Cortez and Padilla appear alongside Flake and Luna, while Abrams and Ifill, longtime voices on voting rights and civil-rights law, sit next to the conservative author Donald T. Critchlow and the progressive streamer Hasan Piker. That range extends who the film is speaking to: Netflix is positioning "14th" for an audience beyond the festival and awards circuit that embraced "13th," and the mixed lineup gives the film a built-in claim to being heard across the aisle it examines. Those affected most directly include the New York Film Festival itself, which has now bookended a decade of its own history with the two DuVernay films, and ARRAY, whose Filmworks division produced the new documentary alongside DuVernay's longtime collaborators Spencer Averick, Tammy Garnes and Paul Garnes.

"Conversation, Not Applause"

DuVernay has said she chose the festival for the premiere because of what it represents to her as a venue for argument rather than tribute, a point echoed by the festival's own leadership. "NYFF has always been a place where films invite conversation rather than simply applause," she said in comments distributed with the festival's announcement, adding that she hoped the film would leave audiences "debating, questioning, and, above all, imagining what is still possible." NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim said the festival was "honored to close this edition" with the film, calling it "a movie for the moment that sees through the fog of the present" and crediting its clarity for showing "precisely what led us here, and what is at stake right now," per TheGrio's coverage of the film's release plans.

From Alice Tully Hall to the Multiplex

Friday's screening is the first time a general audience will see the finished film; the selection itself, along with the interviewee list and release calendar, was set in July, when Film at Lincoln Center published the Closing Night announcement and Deadline first reported the project. Beyond its own release calendar, "14th" arrives as Netflix and ARRAY face a familiar question: whether a sequel built around a live political fight can match the reach "13th" found in 2016 and again in 2020, when renewed attention turned it into one of the platform's most-watched documentaries. Netflix has not disclosed the film's runtime or any additional festival stops, and whether it factors into this winter's documentary awards conversation will not be clear until the theatrical qualifying run concludes in late November. For now, the test is more immediate: how a Lincoln Center audience on Friday night, and then an international streaming audience five weeks later, responds to a film built around the question of what citizenship still guarantees, a century and a half after Congress wrote the promise into the Constitution.