The filmmaker Ava DuVernay has a reputation for tackling challenging material about America’s troubled past with such works as “Selma” and “When They See Us.” “Origin,” her adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s best-seller “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” may be her most ambitious undertaking to date. “This breaks every screenwriting rule, every rule of filmmaking that I know,” DuVernay tells David Remnick. Plus, the journalist John Nichols discusses what it’s like to be drawn into a January 6th conspiracy theory, and former President Trump’s legal defense in the federal case against him.
