Arabic version: آفا دوفيرناي تستكشف التعديل الرابع عشر في وثائقي جديد

According to The Guardian, Ava DuVernay’s new documentary, 14th, examines the 14th amendment and what she describes as attacks on its protections, including birthright citizenship. The film follows her Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary 13th, which explored the exception in the 13th amendment allowing slavery “as a punishment for crime.”

DuVernay said President Trump’s January 2025 executive order concerning birthright citizenship prompted her to investigate the amendment. She initially expected to make a film focused on birthright citizenship, the first and best-known of the amendment’s five sections, but said research and travel led her to examine challenges involving its other provisions as well.

The director said making the film helped her process fear and anger during what she called a difficult two years in Los Angeles. She told the newspaper that she had seen people in her neighbourhood pulled from cars and that people she knows were hiding in their homes. “When I would feel the rage and the fear, I put it into the film,” she said.

14th is structured around 50 interviews personally conducted by DuVernay, featuring historians, constitutional experts, politicians and younger online voices. Participants include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Hasan Piker, Yale professor David W Blight, Anna Paulina Luna, Dean Withers, Jeff Flake and legal scholar Sherrilyn Ifill, who founded the 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy at Howard University in 2025.

The documentary also follows Devon “the Statue Slayer” Henry, a contractor who removed Confederate monuments for local governments, and uses music, film clips and comedy routines to consider how culture carries historical messages. DuVernay said the film uses traditional animation and AI to animate archival photographs, including images of Black American life during Reconstruction.