Selma director Ava Duvernay coaches lead actor David Oyelowo on set (Source: Variety)
Last week, I attended a screening of Ava DuVernay’s Selma about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1965 voting rights marches of Alabama.
Desperate for inspiration, fresh off my second rejection from Sundance Screenwriters Labs—this time, unlike last year’s form letter, a lovely e-mail from the program director praising my “empathy” towards the story’s characters—I took the subway uptown to the Academy Theater in Manhattan.
A light rain fell as I pushed my way into a modern building at 59th Street and Lexington Avenue, the East Coast home of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In the lobby, a lone security guard manned the front desk while a mousy-haired woman handed attendees tickets to the post-screening dinner.
I took one and headed downstairs to the theater, breezing past a giant Oscar statue to the check-in table where New York program director Patrick Harrison, a bespectacled man of color, greeted me.
“Are you a guest?” he asked, searching my face. It’s his job to know all the local members and I clearly wasn’t one, though I seemed interesting enough.
My short film, I told him, had screened here at the 2013 Student Academy Awards (SAA) semifinals. Having received an invitation for the Selma screening tonight, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to watch the film before its release.
Patrick nodded, remembering my name, and asked what I’d been up to lately.
“I’m turning the short into a feature for my NYU Grad Film thesis,” I replied. As ambitious as it sounded, I had come to realize the more I said it out loud, the more attainable it seemed. He wished me good luck, waving me into the theater with just a few minutes to spare before the film began.
To say that Selma went beyond my expectations is to propound the falsehood that I could have even imagined it. Having seen Ava Duvernay’s Middle of Nowhere—though interesting and promising, definitely an early director’s effort—I would not have envisioned the near-perfect storytelling of Selma two years later.
It had the nuanced, dynamic performances of Oyelowo and Ejogo; the boldness to include a scene about King’s noted infidelities, the kind of messy truths that make our heroes human; the luminous cinematography of Bradford Young who, if he hasn’t received one yet, deserves an Oscar nomination. Then there was the brilliant way the documentary footage was handled, interwoven in a way that was never expositional, but served to lift a fictionalized narrative to a kind of operatic truth.
Read the rest of my essay, Selma and the American-ness of the Academy, on Gawker.