I just watched Ava Duvernay’s film ORIGIN. And it was absolutely breathtaking and almost heartbreakingly underrated and under-marketed. It’s a film that almost everyone should see, a piece of art as important as all the other arts that have brought on great social change. It’s masterfully rendered, tugging at our pathos, ethos, and logos as a great story does. I don’t understand why we’re not talking about this film enough.
It dramatized and put to cinematic language all the nuanced moments I have experienced and witnessed as a first-generation immigrant in the United States. The land of irony. It perhaps left out one important subgroup while mentioning so many others in sequence. The undocumented immigrants in the United States. I hope that one day I can fill in this gap. I hope to tell a story that sheds light on the current Caste system in America, which has to do with how we treat over 10 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.
There’s a scene where Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s characters tries to convince a Jewish woman living in Germany that the past experiences of Jews and Blacks are linked somehow. The Jewish woman almost cannot accept this. And it rang true. It’s difficult to acknowledge that the parts in us that hurts the most, whether it’s a personal trauma or generational, can be compared and found similar to another subgroups’ sufferings. Sometimes, we become identified with the experiences that have hurt us the most. I don’t know why this happens. Maybe because that particular minority moniker that caused so pain within us becomes engrained in our identity and how we see ourselves. I don’t know why, for instance, my identity as a woman and my identity as a first-generation immigrant is so much stronger than my identity as an Asian. Maybe it’s because I have witnessed and felt isolation and loneliness in these two identities, and became attached to them like a life raft lest I forget what had happened and become complacent. Maybe it’s because I see my vocation as bearing witness to what I’ve seen and felt, and dreaming up what I hope can be different for my younger self and for those who share similar experiences.
I see why Angelina Jolie hosted a screening of ORIGIN recently at The London. Those who experienced heartbreak, which is all of us, can see a film and empathize with the heartbreak of the writer / filmmaker who bled on the page to tell the story. And I hope that the monumental effort that goes into telling a meaningful story gets its moment in the sun. To me, ORIGIN is a type of film that I hope to make someday. It’s more meaningful, more emotional, more engrossing than OPPENHEIMER or BARBIE.
I read one of the reviews for ORIGIN that people walked out of the theater after ten minutes because it was too “heavy”. That’s… I think that’s like being a good German. And that’s what we’re doing as a nation to news about undocumented immigrants. Forever subjugating it to secondary news of non-national importance. We’re so entranced by the world news and what goes on elsewhere. But we’re so afraid of facing what goes on within our own nation. That our caste system is alive and well, and that we’re all participating in it by not speaking up against it. I hope someday I’ll have the courage, the artistry, and the business acumen to speak up about what I have witnessed and what I know to be true. That our nation can be a beautiful place if we only open our eyes to see and accept the injustices that go on.