Our ability to connect with a film correlates with its capacity to translate what it is saying into a message we can feel in our skin. Ultimately this is the great challenge Ava DuVernay’s ambitious “Origin” has ahead of it, despite the profound beauty and clarity with which she alchemizes her source material, Isabel Wilkerson’s expansive bestseller “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”
Wilkerson’s book argues that the human tendency to create social hierarchies relegating certain types of people as lesser than others is not always about race. She bolsters her theory by building links between American slavery and Jim Crow, the class system in India deeming the Dalit people to be “untouchable" and the Nazi regime’s codifying of laws leading up to the Holocaust.
