Filmmaking as Flight: Ava DuVernay

The accolades continue to roll in for the goddess of cinema known as Ava DuVernay. It’s no exaggeration to say her stellar body of work has shaped the business of filmmaking.

All in good time

In just over a decade, DuVernay has written, produced, and or directed more than thirty titled. She’s also made headway in the industry as a film distributor and public relations expert.

Outside the film industry, DuVernay has been busy as well. She created the Urban Beauty Collective, a venture that provides over ten thousand black neighborhoods with barbershops and salons, and Hello Beautiful, a company geared towards the black women of Generation Y.

DuVernay brings to the screen films worthy of attention, respect, and financial success. Her work in television has garnered just as many awards and accomplishments as her work in film too. She became a creative force and role model for other black women, never hesitating to inject her characters and stories with authenticity and passion for living.

Triumphs

A full range of emotions infuse her work. She champions the spirit of all humankind particularly black Americans who’ve been marginalized and underrepresented through the history of Hollywood. She is able to communicate the profound triumphs inherent in even small details of their lives.

In the television drama, When They See Us (2019), the scene where Jharrel Jerome’s character desperately wants air conditioning in his cell, Duvernay focuses on the young man’s yearning just for a blast of cool air.

The soul of the audience

In her film Selma (2014), she presents Dr. Martin Luther King as a towering figure and thoroughly complicated at the same time.

DuVernay always seeks to elevate people, while authentically depicting the daily struggles of their lives. She uses the simple power of a single image to touch the soul of the audience.

Her mission is to maintain a balance between commerce and art. She seeks to depict the lives of black men and women with depth and complexity so the audience, especially black Americans in the audience, will esteem them, relate to them, and aspire to the idealism and universal virtues they represent.

The wearer of many hats, in Hollywood and in business, DuVernay has lived by her creed....She has lent her own voice to the men and women she’s brought to life on the screen, and in the neighborhoods around the country. With the might of her mind, she’s effectively communicated the universal truth that black Americans, like any human being, have more to offer than subservience to the whims or power of any other human being, least of all by virtue of race.

The role as a leader

By learning her way through her projects, she fulfills the role as a leader not just behind the camera but in neighborhoods surrounding her Long Beach, California hometown.

DuVernay is like the director of a museum that shows the lightness and darkness of a specific people and time. She makes clear there’s place for the songs of black Americans, to be belted out, or with hushed subtlety as they wish. She encourages her audience to pick up a camera and start recording, to feel empowered to tell their stories.

Ava DuVernay is a creative force to be reckoned with. She knows how to put her business interests together with her artistic notions and integrate them. Her egoistic attitude is what has prepared her for her career and a love life of cinema. The freshness, the truth and creativity she brings to her projects also makes her a unique powerhouse in a wasteland of soullessness and apathy. With her scripts, her camera, and her business savvy, she integrates thought and emotion to educate and inspire generations of people the world over, past, present, and future. She lets her creative wings spread and take to the sky.