Ava Duvernay’s significant film Origin finally dropped on Netflix in India last week, after playing at the Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals in 2023.

DuVernay is a powerful director, producer, writer and distributor, who empowers BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) and non-binary women filmmakers. Her solid body of about 23 works, including features, documentaries, shorts and series, including Middle of Nowhere (Best Director, Sundance Film Festival, 2012), Selma (on Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s 1965 campaign for equal voting rights), 13th (on the racial inequality of the American prison system; Oscar nomination, Best Documentary Feature); A Wrinkle in Time (Disney, sci-fi); When They See Us (a series exposing racism in the US); and Queen Sugar (a series on a family drama around the inheritance of a huge sugarcane farm in Louisiana, 2016-2022). With this series, she created a radical sisterhood revolution in Hollywood: on realizing that women filmmakers are not taken seriously till they have directed TV/series, she created and executive produced—along with Oprah Winfrey—this TV drama series. She hired 42 diverse BIPOC and non-binary women to direct its 88 episodes, including Maryam Keshavarz, Indian-American Pratibha Parmar, So Yong Kim and Stacey Muhammad. She also started Array, a distribution company, to distribute the work of BIPOC and women of all kinds; including Deepa Mehta’s Funny Boy, Agam Darshi’s Donkeyhead and Sujata Day’s Definition Please.