Caption: The sitting Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, with filmmaker Ava DuVernay in Washington, DC in January 2025. Credit: Paul Garnes

 

Ava DuVernay’s ‘14th’ Examines Citizenship, Equality and the Unfinished Fight Over Who Belongs in America

Written in the aftermath of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was intended to establish citizenship, equal protection and due process under the law. More than 150 years later, its promise remains at the center of a national struggle over who is recognized, protected and permitted to belong in America.

Ava DuVernay examines that continuing constitutional battle in “14th,” a new documentary that connects the amendment’s Reconstruction-era origins with the political and cultural conflicts unfolding across the country today.

Drawing on extensive archival research and contemporary headlines, DuVernay moves the discussion beyond legal theory and into the lives shaped by the amendment’s interpretation. At the center of the film is a question the United States has yet to resolve: Who gets counted as fully American?

“If ‘13th’ asked who gets caged, then ‘14th’ asks who gets counted,” DuVernay said. “This is not a film about the past tense of freedom. I’m not interested in asking you to look back. The film asks what kind of country is being written beneath our feet now… while we’re busy believing the stories we’ve all been told.”

For “14th,” DuVernay conducted more than 50 interviews with historians, lawyers, scholars, curators, cultural workers, political commentators and elected officials representing sharply different perspectives.

The documentary features Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, former Republican Senator Jeff Flake and Democratic Senator Alex Padilla. Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill, legal scholar Robert Chang and political leader Stacey Abrams appear alongside conservative author Donald T. Critchlow and cultural commentator Hasan Piker.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historians Eric Foner and David Blight provide further context on Reconstruction, the amendment’s origins and the constitutional argument that has followed it through generations of American life.

“14th” follows DuVernay’s Academy Award-nominated and BAFTA-winning documentary “13th,” which examined race, incarceration and the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery while retaining an exception for criminal punishment. Her latest film shifts the focus from who is imprisoned to who is acknowledged as a citizen and afforded the protections that citizenship is supposed to carry.

Adam Del Deo, vice president of documentary film and series at Netflix, described “14th” as a continuation of DuVernay’s ability to place American history in direct conversation with the present.

“Ava’s remarkable ability to bring history into conversation with the present made her last documentary, the seminal BAFTA-winning and Academy Award-nominated ‘13th,’ a cultural touchstone of the last quarter century,” Del Deo said. “With ‘14th,’ she delivers another ambitious and thought-provoking documentary with the depth, artistry and humanity that have come to define her work.”

Produced by ARRAY, “14th” is directed by DuVernay and produced by Ava DuVernay, Spencer Averick, Tammy Garnes and Paul Garnes.

DuVernay is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker whose work includes “Selma,” “Middle of Nowhere,” “A Wrinkle in Time,” “Origin,” “When They See Us” and “Queen Sugar.” She is the founder of ARRAY, the narrative-change collective behind film, television, documentary, branded and installation projects exploring history, identity and the human condition.

With “14th,” DuVernay returns to one of the central tensions in American democracy: the distance between the rights written into the Constitution and the people who must continue fighting to have those rights recognized.