13TH – Resources

Our docu-fiction feature film production, ALTON, aims to support and extend the action inspired by outstanding documentaries, such as Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Selma, and great docu-fiction feature films, such as Green Book and 12 Years a Slave. The films featured in our POW! Future Salon show how media can motivate action and how POW! [Power Our World] can amplify media impact.

13TH Trailer 

Netflix has made the full film 13TH available to watch on Youtube for free. 13TH has had more than 4 million views since its launch on Youtube April 17, 2020. Spread the word.

BACKGROUND:

Bryan Stevenson, who is prominently featured in the film 13th, has written a thought-provoking, sobering and inspirational book, Just Mercy. He runs The Equal Justice Initiative. 

• • They have good advice for those getting involved.
  • There are “study guides” for the film 13th here: One / Two. 
  • Rick Klau wrote a piece about volunteer activities in Silicon Valley 
  • On the DEFY ventures site he suggests concrete ways to engage and volunteer. 

See The Prison Pie.

In their 2017 article in the Harvard Business Review on 13TH Film Director Ava DuVernay, researchers Adam Galinsky and Joe C. Magee of Columbia University describe how power and status act as self-reinforcing loops. How much status a person has directly affects whether their ideas are heard. People with high status (the Hollywood producer, the project lead, someone who looks like the existing leader) are met with greater receptivity early on, earning them the time and emotional support to develop nascent ideas into more complete and robust ones. This success then further boosts their status, leading to even more opportunity. Equally, a person of relatively low status — someone who lacks a pedigree or credentials, is too old or too young, is female, or is a person of color — is unlikely get any of the same support, not because their idea was weighed and deemed unworthy, but because it came from a person who was deemed relatively powerless, and therefore unworthy of being heard.

Facing this dynamic, DuVernay withdrew from the loop. After being dismissed time and again, she stopped seeking access and permission from the kingmakers and tried a different approach: She built a new boat.

In 2010, DuVernay launched a tiny distribution company of just two people, now called Array. Array was to be a peer-to-peer grassroots distribution, arts, and advocacy collective focused on films by women and people of color.

Articles about Ava DuVernay, Director of 13TH
Harvard Business Review
Leap Action
Prison Policy 2020
The Million Book Project for Prisons

From Group Discussion following the film:

We agreed that we can all tell others about the importance of the 13th documentary and that it is free to watch on YouTube.

From Ismael Ghalimi: “The black prison population is used to keep the white working-class down by sending the message: ‘There’s a group that is even worse off than you … You’re not at the bottom.’”  

From Mark Finnern: The CIA brought cheap Crack Cocaine into the inner cities to finance their operations in foreign countries as described in the book Dark Alliance by Gary Web (San Jose Mercury News). 

From Zann Gill – Ideas for future films, inspired by 13TH: 

• The Prisons-for-Profit Machine – though this point was made in 13TH, it deserves a whole film of its own.
• The Plea Bargain Strategy – Stressed young men, being dragged into prison, are often given a special offer:  “If you just admit that you’re guilty without a trial, then we’ll let you go back to support your family.” What they’re not told is that this special offer comes with a secret agenda: the accused gets to go back to his family, to avoid prison and an unjust criminal justice system. But now he has a criminal record as a felon…. for life. His right to vote, get a job, get a bank loan, do the other things free citizens do, are then taken away from him because he’s admitted that he’s a criminal. This point was also made in 13TH, with a young man who refused the plea bargain deal offered to him because he insisted that he would not say he was guilty of a crime when he had committed no crime. He was put into prison for three years for a crime that he didn’t commit. He was finally released as innocent. A few years later he committed suicide. This deceitful policy deserves a full film of its own.

ACTION STEPS:

• Support any politician who has a policy to end for-profit prisons, e.g., Andrew Yang has a prison reform policy. 
• Work to counter voter disenfranchisement. Follow Greg Palast whose investigative reporting on that topic is in his book: How Trump Stole the 2020 election by almost 2 Million votes not counted in 2016. 
• Follow Angela Davis  

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