In 2021, anxious over the long climb out of the pandemic and my own unemployment, I read Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabelle Wilkerson. The book was fascinating, deeply affecting, painful, and also hopeful. I’ve carried its lessons close ever since that coldest winter.

I never expected that it could be adapted into a film…though I should have known better when there is talent like Ava DuVernay in the world.

ORIGIN begins with a pack of Skittles and a grey hoodie. Without hearing his name it’s clear that we are being introduced to Trayvon Martin, and that a tale of injustice and tragedy will follow.

However what does follow isn’t just a history lesson of man’s inhumanity to man. Instead, ORIGIN follows Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) as she seeks a greater truth. Wilkerson isn’t satisfied that the world is the way it is because of racism – she believes something much deeper has brought us here, and she takes us along as she tries to prove it.

What she is able to proove and clarify is that much of the world’s strife comes down to a caste system – that there are fixed social groups into which individuals are born within a particular system of social stratification.

Proof will take her years. It will take her around the world, introduce her to heroes and villains throughout modern history, all while going through person turmoil – enough to make most of us think that the book can wait. And yet, the book will not wait…and we are better for the personal sacrifice of one brilliant scribe.

The world doesn’t deserve ORIGIN. It doesn’t deserve the humanity, patience, love, and grace that the film cloaks us with before it leads us on a very dark walk through our own history. Every time Isabelle takes another step on the path, we gain a clearer and clearer understanding of why the world is the way it is, and how so many let it happen. It is a harsh reality that should be as simple as showing bold black letters on a stark white screen.

And yet…

Isabelle and by-extension Ava DuVernay know the burden they are about to saddle all of us with. They know the tangled knot of oppression, pain, and injustice they are handing the audience to untangle. They know what we are about to see and feel will unsettle us deeply … and they want us to know that it’s okay. They want us to take our time with this pain – this responsibility – and find the strength to push forward.

It’s only by pushing forward that we can begin the long hard work of building a better world.

This approach is what keeps the film grounded, and what honours the perseverance it took to bring it to light. In writing Caste, Isabelle Wilkerson parlayed overwhelming personal grief into making sense of a long history of senseless oppression. In adapting ORIGIN, Ava DuVernay understood that the best way to make that history tangible to those who brave her film was to bring it all to the personal stories, the grief, the senseless loss. In the name of these personal details, the lesson is presented with beauty, with tenderness, and occasionally even with humour.

Both women have given the world more than we deserve, and they have done it with love and optimism in the face of a ruthless past.

Seven years ago when my father died, someone who followed me on social media told me that in their culture the expression of condolence was to offer to carry a part of the burden of grief. In ORIGIN, that’s precisely what Wilkerson and DuVernay do for us. Their empathetic prose and tender filmmaking take back a piece of the burden of the lesson – and frankly, it’s more than the world deserves.

The way forward will be challenging, and the load of responsibility will be heavy. If everyone carries a piece of the load, we may yet make it there together.