Ava DuVernay To Write & Direct Netflix Adaptation Of Acclaimed Isabel Wilkerson’s Best Seller ‘Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents’
Deadline is reporting that Ava DuVernay is set to direct, write and produce her first feature film for Netflix, an adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson’s NYT bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
Through a multiple-story structure, Caste examines the unspoken system that has shaped America and chronicles how our lives today are defined by a hierarchy of human divisions dating back generations.
DuVernay, Sarah Bremner and Paul Garnes are producing the project via Array Filmworks.
This would be DuVernay’s first feature since she helmed A Wrinkle In Time for Walt Disney in 2018. Her directing credits include the limited series When They See Us, the Oscar nominated documentary 13th, Selma, Middle of Nowhere and I Will Follow.
DuVernay currently is producing Colin In Black & White, a Netflix limited series based on the adolescent life of athlete and activist Colin Kaepernick. She is repped by Nina Shaw and Gordon Bobb of Del, Moonves, Shaw.
Wilkerson was awarded the Pulitzer in journalism for her profile of a fourth-grade boy from Chicago’s South Side and for her reporting on the 1993 Midwestern flood. Her debut novel, 2010’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, is about the 20th century great migration of African Americans from the South to the Midwest, Northeast and West.