You have to make these things so people can bear witness and grow from it.
WATCHING THE footage of a police officer gunning down Terrence Crutcher as his hands were raised in Tulsa, Okla., filmmaker Ava DuVernay wept — but not just for the same reason as other viewers.
The “Selma” director had wrapped “13th,” her documentary on America’s racial divide debuting on the opening night of the New York Film Festival Friday. DuVernay had already cut it close by covering Philando Castile’s July death at the hands of Minnesota police and recent similar incidents in her film.
“When the recent shootings and video came out ... I just cried, feeling, ‘Oh, no, they’re not in the piece,’ ” DuVernay said of Crutcher’s Sept. 16 death.
“Which is a completely irrational, emotional, sad reaction, but I’ll never be able to get everyone in the movie because it’s an ongoing problem.
“There will be many people that are missed because it’s not stopping anytime soon,” she told the Daily News.
There’s still a lot permeating every frame of the 100-minute film, which puts a spotlight on a loophole in the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude — “except as a punishment for crime.”
DuVernay chronicles the ripple effect over the past 150 years that led to the mass incarceration of people of color — a state of affairs in which one in three black men will go to prison in their lifetimes.
There were more tears in the editing bay. DuVernay and longtime editor Spencer Averick spent two years sifting through graphic imagery including Jim Crow-era lynchings, the badly beaten body of Emmett Till and the video of Eric Garner in that fatal chokehold, deciding what was too graphic to show.
“It was definitely an emotional experience making this film — just as emotional as shooting the ‘Bloody Sunday’ scene on ‘Selma,’ having to call, ‘action,’ and watching people beat each other,” DuVernay said from the set of her next movie, “A Wrinkle in Time.”
“You have to make these things so people can bear witness and grow from it.”
The result earned DuVernay an unprecedented honor: “13th” will be the first documentary in the New York Film Festival’s 54-year history to land the opening slot, on Friday. And it will have a much greater audience when it hits Netflix on Oct. 7.
That’s just in time for the final stretch of the presidential election. The documentary slams Republican contender Donald Trump for evoking language that mirrors white supremacists from the ’60s. It also takes Democrat Hillary Clinton to task for her previous support of the 1994 crime bill — which she’s since apologized for — that swelled the country’s prison population.
“The candidates are stronger under our scrutiny,” said DuVernay. “It’s incumbent on us to scrutinize.”
“I feel like there is a therapy and a harmony and a forward movement when you realize what has happened is not only happening to you right now,” she added. “That is part of a larger picture that we can repaint together.”