*Ava DuVernay wants audiences to leave her latest documentary ready to act, not reassured.
“I’m not really interested in instilling hope,” the filmmaker told The Hollywood Reporter. Instead, she wants viewers to “feel ignited.”
“I’m interested in stirring the fight in people,” DuVernay added. “We’ll see what happens.”
Her Netflix film, “14th,” held its world premiere Friday as the closing night selection of the 2026 New York Film Festival. Speaking at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, DuVernay said she finished the film two weeks ago to keep it current.
“The erosion of democracy doesn’t announce itself,” she told the crowd. “It happens one day at a time and one exception at a time. Maybe the most dangerous thing about losing democracy is you can live your ordinary life while it’s happening. We need to fight, and I hope you come out of this film wanting to fight hard.”
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The documentary focuses on the 14th Amendment and also covers the 13th and 15th, the three amendments adopted after the Civil War. It tracks attacks on the 14th from Reconstruction through the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. The film also addresses current immigration raids, mass deportations, and moves by President Trump and other Republican leaders to limit or end birthright citizenship.
Netflix will debut “14th” in theaters Nov. 27 and begin streaming it Dec. 4.
Stacey Abrams, who founded Fair Fight Action and ran for Georgia governor, appears in the film. “We are in the midst of a competitive authoritarian state. This is no longer a theory,” she told THR. Abrams pointed to the Democracy Index, an international ranking that no longer classifies the U.S. as a true democracy.
“But that’s not a permanent situation,” she said. “We have the ability to claim it back.”
Sherrilyn Ifill, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, spoke with THR on the red carpet. “I think everything is at stake,” she said. Ifill noted that the nation split apart once before, when 600,000 Americans were killed.
“We are at a point of fracture again,” she said. “What we can learn from the 14th Amendment is our country can be refounded; it can be stitched back together.”
Ifill also delivers the film’s final message. “We are all founders and framers,” she says in the doc. “This is the time, and you are the one.”
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