AVA DUVERNAY
In the spring of 2020, even though the world had gone quiet and movie theaters sat dark, the film AGGIE found its way to audiences, through virtual screenings and, in one of the more improbable images of that strange year, drive-in theaters glowing under open skies. The kind of detail that could only belong to that moment, a small piece of history sealed in amber, a film about art, justice, and imagination reaching people through parking lots and headlights because nothing was going to stop it from being seen.
Ava was there for all of it, not just as a voice in the film, but as the one who jettisoned the story inside of it, who gave the film the weight it carried. She came to Aggie's story the way many did, through the connective tissue of this community. She was head-down, "trying to scratch my way through Hollywood," when a stranger (fellow Luminary Darren Walker!) told her about a woman who had just seen her film at the New York Film Festival and had been moved to do something extraordinary with her experience.
Aggie sold a painting and started the Art for Justice Fund. And Ava, the filmmaker whose work had set that whole chain in motion, found herself on the AFJ Board, watching her artistry ripple outward into rooms and lives she had never pictured. She said it herself, she made something and thought it would exist in one way, and someone saw it and multiplied it into something else entirely. That's the whole story of what art can do, and what she's spent her career proving, again and again. It's also the whole story of Aubin. We've spent thirty years believing in that multiplication, knowing that a film made with care and intention will find its way, through parking lots and headlights if it has to, to the people who need it.
Aubin is so grateful for her and our, at times, parallel, collaborative, synchronous, complimentary, simultaneous work at all the intersections of our living. Her model, companionship, championship, and achievement are true gifts not only to us but to the whole world.