Ava DuVernay takes on 150 years of battles over citizenship and civil rights in her new documentary, 14th, a project she describes as building a plane midflight.
“This movie kicked my butt because it was like building a plane midflight,” says Oscar-nominated director Ava DuVernay of 14th, her documentary on the 14th Amendment.
The film takes on the amendment that covers birthright citizenship and due process, and roughly 150 years of fighting over what it means. It mixes archival scholarship with current events, and it carries legal experts, politicians, historians and cultural figures. DuVernay has said it holds all her feelings about everything happening in the past three years.
14th closes the 64th New York Film Festival, which runs from September 25 to October 12, 2026. The world premiere is the Closing Night selection at Alice Tully Hall on Friday, October 9. “14th is a movie for the moment that sees through the fog of the present,” said Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director. DuVernay, on taking it there: “NYFF has always been a place where films invite conversation rather than simply applause.”
What she keeps coming back to is the difficulty of cutting a film about a live argument. The amendment did not sit still while she worked on it, and she does not pretend the film settles anything. “This film is like an essay,” she says. “We were writing through it, about what we discovered, how we felt, and what it means.”
She is also thinking about the record this decade will leave behind, and about whose job it is to make one. “They’re going to study this time,” she says, and then asks the question she says the work turns on: “My question is, how are we getting our arms around that artistically?”
After the festival, 14th has select theatrical runs in the United States and the United Kingdom from November 27, and it then streams globally on Netflix from December 4, which is where most people will actually see it.
