Oscar-nominated director Ava DuVernay is claiming that black filmmakers get discouraged from entering international film festivals because people outside the United States don’t care about their stories.
DuVernay — director of the Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma and various Netflix prestige projects, who walked away from lucrative first-look deals with both Spotify and Warner Bros. — lamented her lot in life as a black filmmaker, that she was repeatedly discouraged from applying to film festivals because she “wouldn’t get in.”
“For black filmmakers, we’re told that people who love films in other parts of the world don’t care about our stories and don’t care about our films,” DuVernay said at the Venice Film Festival, according to a report by the Guardian.