From The Guardian, today: an interview with Ava DuVernay, the writer/director/producer of 13th and Selma
“Does she think 13th will help Americans face up to the legacy of slavery? “The sad truth,” she says with despondency, “is that some minds just will not be changed. It might help all of us to once in a while get outside of the United States itself, like go to South Africa or Germany. Because inherent in the very cultural fabric there, you have a sense of the past and of reckoning with it, saying, ‘This happened, and we will bear witness and we will learn from it, we will speak it and say that it happened and we will remember it.’ And we don’t do that here, so we can’t even have a real conversation about it. Because we have not been taught to talk to each other, and we have not been taught to remember.”
If you haven’t watched 13th, I seriously highly recommend it.