Ava Duvernay to produce film adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s Book “CASTE”, for Netflix

Ava DuVernay will direct, write and produce a new feature film adaptation based on the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller  – Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson.

Through a multiple-story structure, Caste examines the unspoken system that has shaped America and chronicles how lives today are defined by a hierarchy of human divisions dating back generations.

Isabel Wilkerson, is the first African-American woman winner of the Pulitzer Prize  for journalism.  She is  also the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns.

Her debut work won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the decade and to The New York Times’s list of the Best Nonfiction of All Time.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, became an instant New York Times bestseller and has been longlisted for the US National Book Award.

“Caste is… written to educate those readers who are unfamiliar with the deep-rooted realities of racism in American history,” writes Yogita Goyal in a review for Los Angeles Review of Books, in which she further opines that for those convinced that racism in the United States isn’t a big problem today, the book should be an eye-opener.

Caste will mark DuVernay’s next feature project and her first feature film at Netflix, reuniting her with Netflix executive Tendo Nagenda. The pair worked together on Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time, making her the highest grossing Black woman director in American box office history.

The project continues Netflix’s relationship with DuVernay, who was the first Black woman feature director to be nominated for an Academy Award with her acclaimed documentary, 13th, garnering BAFTA, Emmy and Peabody Awards.

Most recently, her limited series When They See Us received 16 Emmy nominations.

The Academy Award and Golden Globe nominee DuVernay is currently producing a limited series for Netflix based on the adolescent life of athlete and activist Colin Kaepernick entitled Colin in Black & White.