DuVernay’s “14th” Premieres at Lincoln Center With a Warning on Democracy

Ava DuVernay unveiled “14th” on Friday as the closing-night film of the New York Film Festival. She told the audience she had finished the documentary only two weeks before the screening. The director used the evening to press viewers to fight hard for democracy.

The Netflix documentary examines the long political battle over the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of birthright citizenship, due process and equal protection, along with its bar on insurrectionists holding public office. DuVernay argues the Trump administration has pushed American democracy into crisis, deepening the disenfranchisement of Black citizens. “Erosion of democracy doesn’t announce itself,” she said.

The film arrives a decade after “13th,” her Oscar-nominated study of the prison system. That film opened the same festival in 2016, a month before Donald Trump first won the presidency. “If ‘13th’ asked who gets caged, then ‘14th’ asks who gets counted,” DuVernay said in a statement announcing the project.

She built the case through over 50 expert interviews, including Pulitzer Prize winners Eric Foner and David Blight. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake and legal scholars Sherrilyn Ifill, Robert Chang and Stacey Abrams also appear. Commentators Donald Critchlow and Hasan Piker round out a cast that spans the political spectrum.

Festival director Dennis Lim called the film a movie for the moment that cuts through the fog of current events. Reviewers have read it as an impassioned defense of the Constitution that takes direct aim at Trump. One critic praised it as a cogent, urgent call to action while faulting Netflix’s plan to give it only a brief theatrical run before streaming.

The timing sharpens the stakes. The premiere lands just ahead of the November midterms, which could reshape the balance of power in Washington. The 108-minute film opens in select U.S. and U.K. theaters Nov. 27 and streams globally on Netflix on Dec. 4.