This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Ava DuVernay is a filmmaker with a profound appreciation for history.

Nearly 10 years ago, her acclaimed feature, Selma,

dramatized Martin Luther King's role

in the Voting Rights March of 1965.

Duvernais' documentary 13th

looked at the 13th Amendment

and the contemporary prison system,

and that film won a Peabody Award in 2017.

Police violence, that isn't the problem in and of itself.

It's reflection of a much larger, brutal system of racial and social control known as mass incarceration,

which authorizes this kind of police violence.

Given the moment that we're in, with book banning rampant and Nikki Haley trying not even to mention

slavery as a cause of the Civil War, in this moment, grappling with our past in film

or in any other medium, that feels like something very critical. Duverne's new film

is an adaptation of cast, the best-selling book by Isabel Wilkerson. That book asks us to look at

oppression in Nazi Germany, India, and the Jim Crow South through the frame of cast.

Duvonne said that she read Isabel Wilkerson's book three times, and she knew almost immediately that she wanted to make a movie. She's called her adaptation, Origin, and it opens later this month. Hi! How are you? How are you? I'm good. I'm good. I meet you. Is it our first time meeting? I think so. I'm happy.

I'm happy.

I'm happy.

Isabel Wilkerson has written two astonishing books, the warmth of other suns, which is about

...