Ava’s work was waking up America. I was spellbound by 13th, her hard-hitting documentary that tracked the roots of mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex back to a loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment, which rendered the abolishment of slavery as a conditional freedom rather than an absolute human right. The film’s raw, journalistic approach to truth telling was what we needed, not only to unpack how we got here, but to feel and create our way forward.
