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One of the most powerful superhero narrative devices is the influence of family; the lessons they teach us, and the desire to make them proud in return. Very few of our True Superheroes embody this trope as much as Ava DuVernay, whose career as a director, documentarian and activist has been influenced and shaped by the women who raised her, and the examples they set.

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Family heroes

Ava was born in 1972, and grew up in Compton, California. She has described herself as being a “very nerdy, awkward” child, and one who was chiefly inspired by the women around her: “The heroes that I had were in my family; my mother, my grandmother and my Aunt Denise.”

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In particular, it was Aunt Denise who guided Ava’s interest in culture. She would work nights in order to be able to take Ava to see movies, art exhibitions, and theater productions, but film proved to be the biggest draw and the pair would go to the cinema at least once a week.

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Unlike many filmmakers, however, young Ava was not immediately convinced of her future behind the camera. Instead, she made the most of her nerdiness, excelled in school, and after graduating from UCLA she pursued a career in journalism.

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False starts 

Our other True Superheroes of cinema - George Lucas and Ava’s good friend Ryan Coogler - were already directing Oscar-nominated movies by the time they turned 30. DuVernay didn’t pick up a camera until she was 32. Her foray into journalism ended swiftly; she secured an internship with CBS but became disillusioned after being asked to go through the trash of a juror in the OJ SImpson trial. Her next direction would prove more fruitful as she turned toward Hollywood to set up her own publicity firm in 1999, handling a wide variety of blockbuster movies including Spy Kids, Shrek 2, and Dreamgirls.

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She gained invaluable industry experience during this period but there was also sadness as her aunt Denise passed away in 2003. In response to the loss of her mentor, Ava began to write scripts about her family.

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Affirmation from Oprah

In 2005, Ava made her first short film, Saturday Night Life, based on the experiences of her mother. She also started to make documentaries as they were cheaper to produce, gave her an opportunity to learn her trade, and also allowed her to highlight other women she had grown up with in My Mic Sounds Nice, a fascinating history of women in hip-hop that even included a section on Ava’s time as a rapper in early 90s Los Angeles.

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Ava learned her craft quickly and by 2010 she had written, directed and co-produced her first full-length feature, I Will Follow, which depicts a successful artist dealing with the death of her terminally ill aunt. Even the title - taken from a U2 song - related to Denise, who loved the band. With all her industry experience, Ava knew that her intensely personal and heartfelt movie would struggle to find a distributor; as she later told the Los Angeles Times: “I knew no studio or indie distributor was going to want it. It was too woman, too indie, too outside what could make a dollar for them.”

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Ava’s solution was a simple one. She set up her own independent distribution company, called the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM). The film was a success, receiving glowing reviews, and AFFRM has gone on to distribute 31 movies since I Will Follow’s release. One of those was DuVernay’s next feature, 2012’s Middle of Nowhere, which saw her move away from her own experiences, and instead highlight issues faced by other black women. One person it struck a chord with was Oprah Winfrey, who posted on Facebook: 

“So many women - a disproportionate number of them African American women - have to cope with a spouse in jail. This movie, Middle of Nowhere poignantly represents all the drama and feelings involved. I saw the film and was so moved by it. I think you will be too.”

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Big budgets, big themes, big controversy

An endorsement from Oprah Winfrey gets you noticed and Ava quickly went from indie obscurity to major studio success. For her next film she cast Middle of Nowhere’s male lead David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr., in the 2014 historical drama Selma. The film was a critical and commercial smash and DuVernay became the first black woman to direct an Academy Award Best Picture nominee.

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Her next movie proved more divisive. 2018’s A Wrinkle In Time - a special effects-laden adaptation of the classic 1960s sci-fi novel - was a big departure from Ava’s usual subject matter, but it stayed true to her commitment to making films about subjects who are rarely represented on the big screen. In A Wrinkle In Time’s case, that subject is the film’s heroine, a nerdy young girl who keen observers noted bore many similarities to DuVernay, who said: “She’s just a black girl who has no superpowers but ends up doing extraordinary things that she didn’t even know she could, and I relate to that.” The film had an enormous budget of over $100m but it received a mixed reception from reviewers and consequently did not do well at the box office.

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This led to a heated debate about representation in film reviewing. One screen superhero, Brie ‘Captain Marvel’ Larson, memorably stated: “I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle in Time. It wasn’t made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color.” Studies showed that the overwhelming majority of major film reviewers were white (82%) and male (78%), and while A Wrinkle In Time was not to everybody’s tastes, it has a committed fanbase to this day and DuVernay clearly has no regrets, joking that she wasn’t trying to make ‘Selma in space’.

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Documenting injustice and boosting talent

Ava wasn’t just making big-budget feature films at this time; arguably her most important work was on the small screen. In 2016 she released 13th, a powerful Netflix documentary about race, justice, and mass incarceration in the US. Wired wrote that the following year “art collector Agnes Gund sold a Roy Lichtenstein painting from her personal collection for $165m and used $100m of the proceeds to start a fund for criminal justice reform. It was partly because she’d seen 13th”.

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The film would be nominated for another Oscar, this time for Best Documentary Feature. Three years later, she co-wrote and directed the hit Netflix show When They See Us, a dramatization of the events surrounding the notorious Central Park Five case, where five black and Latino youths were wrongfully imprisoned for several years for a 1989 murder. The show was universally acclaimed and nominated for 11 Emmys.

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While all this was going on, Ava also worked tirelessly away from the camera to fight for inclusion and battle prejudice, both in Hollywood and beyond. She was heavily involved in the #OscarsSoWhite campaign of 2015 and 2016, (co-hosting a fundraiser for clean water in Flint on the same night as the 2016 Oscars’ ceremony), and AFFRM has now become Array, with a broadened remit to foster and support minority involvement in all aspects of filmmaking. In 2019, Array was able to provide perhaps the most fitting tribute to Ava’s Aunt Denise with the opening of the Amanda Cinema dedicated to showing works by “black filmmakers, people of color, and women of all kinds”. Amanda was Denise’s middle name.