Ava DuVernay Wins Best Director Award At Sundance Film Festival

By Arturo R. García

Latoya will have more Sundance Film Festival coverage over the course of the week, but we’d be remiss in not extending congratulations to Ava DuVernay on winning the festival’s Best Director award this past Saturday for her second feature, Middle of Nowhere.

DuVernay made a well-received debut last year with I Will Follow, which she wrote and directed.

Nowhere, which DuVernay also wrote and directed, stars Emayatzy Corinealdias (Akira’s Hip-Hop Shop) a woman trying to keep herself up in the wake of her husband (Omari Hardwick) going to jail, with the emphasis on her own struggles in the outside world, rather than her husband’s jail time.

“It touches the prison wife’s tale,” DuVernay told It’sOnTheGrid’s Jason Scoggins “But really it’s a story about a woman who’s living within a relationship that’s imbalanced, which is something that a lot of women – and a lot of people – know a lot about.”

Like her last film, Nowhere was picked up for distribution by Participant Media and AFFRM (African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement), which DuVernay founded to help African-American independent films get increased limited engagements, so her latest effort should be hitting some more film festivals later this year.

We’ve posted DuVernay’s chat with Scoggins, in which she talks about making Nowhere without telling her clients at her other job (she worked as a publicist before becoming a filmmaker), among other subjects, under the cut.