Stacey Abrams, Wikipedia
If it were up to Selma director Ava DuVernay, her upcoming documentary 14th would have been released a lot sooner than the global Netflix release on December 4. The film will also be released in select theaters in the U.S. and the U.K. on November 27. But initially, DuVernay wanted to release the film ahead of the history-making 2026 midterm elections.
Per a logline of the documentary, DuVernay’s first documentary release in a decade, 14th explores the legacy of the 14th Amendment and its ongoing constitutional and social conflict over more than 150 years. Ratified in 1868 after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment is a foundational part of the U.S. Constitution that grants citizenship to everyone born in the United States and guarantees equal protection under the law.
DuVernay delayed the release as a favor to Stacey Abrams. “It was Stacey Abrams who said to me, ‘You shouldn’t do that,’” DuVernay said Thursday at the Global Women’s Summit hosted by The Washington Post. She added that Abrams, the former two-time candidate for Georgia governor and voting rights activist, thought the film “will be more needed and more instructive after” the elections.
“What she really was saying to me is that the opposition is not going away,” DuVernay told The Post’s Geoff Edgers, explaining why Abrams thought it made sense for the film to be released after the midterms. “These ideas are not going away, the money behind it is not going away, and it will come back with a vengeance.”
In an interview with The Guardian, DuVernay said the chaos and evil of President Donald Trump’s America ignited her fire further to create the documentary. “It’s been a very tough two years. I live in Los Angeles, and I’ve seen people in my neighborhood pulled out of their cars. The lady who sells flowers next to my office was there one day, and the next day she wasn’t. People I know personally are literally hiding in their houses, like Anne Frank vibes … So when I would feel the rage and the fear, I put it into the film … And I just … I was doing something.”
14th comes after DuVernay’s 2016 documentary release, 13th. The Netflix documentary explores the intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in America, centering on the loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment that permits slavery as a punishment for crime.