Ava Duvernay: Film Analysis

Overview The film Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay, was based on the historical march for equal rights in Selma, Alabama in 1965. It chronicles the efforts of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and local activists of Selma in their fight against systematic imitation tactics to keep African Americans from voting. The film features civil rights activists Martin Luther King Jr, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, James Orange and Diane Nash. The Selma march helped raise awareness of what African Americans in the south faced for exercising their constitutional right to vote, and the need for the Voting Rights Act (DuVernay, 2014). During the first scene of the film, four young girls were walking down the steps talking about their hair, clothes and their admiration of Coretta Scott King. Then all of a sudden, a bomb goes off. I was completely caught off guard, but knew it was a reference to the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four innocent young girls. I did not expect to see that reference because it happened in Birmingham, not Selma. It seemed as if that bomb reference was used to set the tone of the movie by showing a major incident that outraged the African American community. It was one of the many incidents that made activist realize something needs to be done about the violence against blacks (DuVernay, 2014; Pruitt, 2011). …show more content…
One of the reasons I was excited to watch this film is because I knew it would be a learning experience. Selma, educated me on tactics that the south used to keep blacks from being able to register to vote, Dr. King was in contact with President Johnson throughout the equal voting rights movement, a woman fought alongside Dr. King, and that Dr. King and Coretta Scott King had marital issues (DuVernay,