13th
/“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Filmology Rating: 3.25 out of 4
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Section 1. Amendment Thirteen to the United States Constitution
Ava DuVernay burst onto the film scene for me with 2014’s Selma. Selma to this day remains a film that is constantly on my mind and with our current election cycle I think the film still gains more relevance everyday. So when 13th quietly was announced to have it’s premiere at the New York Film Festival my curiosity went to an all time high level for a documentary.
Basically the documentary looks at the thirteenth amendment to the constitution and how the line “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” is still keeping a form of slavery in tack today. The film uses statistics and video footage to prove its point that we are jailing more black men than white men. One in three black men will end up in jail, sometimes for just a small crime, just to keep our privately funded prisons full. The film is apolitical and lets the facts be facts, never manipulates you and lets you watch the horror speak for itself. Let the acts of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and politicians speak for themselves, let them bury their own graves so to speak.
While the documentary does do a fantastic job conveying the message that it wants the world to know, I couldn’t help but wish the film to be longer. Each decade that is talked about in this film could easily have been an hour long into itself instead of the entire film only being an hour and forty minutes. This could have easily been because Netflix didn’t want to fund an OJ: Made in America type documentary, which runs 7 hours 47 minutes and must have taken thousands of dollars and many man hours to create.
I of course am not black, asian, latino, or anything else. I’m a twenty-four year old white male who has never had to deal with incarceration, let alone ever been targeted by the police or government. I do understand how lucky I am and I hope that other people of all generations understand that fact as well. As white people we are all lucky, we don’t face discrimination by our own government, we were never forced into slavery so the profit of others could go higher and higher. We are truly privileged to have many of the luxuries that other people can only dream about. I’m not talking about living in the 1950s or 1830s I’m talking about living right now in 2016. This documentary brings to light how we live in a culture that would lock the problems away rather than talk about them. I went to school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where I had many classmates tell me the horrors of just trying to walk home after school and I sat with my jaw on the ground wondering, “how can this happen?”
13th might not be able to offer any solutions to these problems that have been going on for generations but it is trying to get every situation heard and out in the open. If we as Americans cannot face our own demons that we create, we should not be allowed to go overseas to tell others how they should live and treat others. We need to lead by example but instead we are showing that racism and fear will always survive our darkest days. To say that 13th is one of the most important films of this year would be an understatement.
Rating: See It
-Jonny G