Ava DuVernay & Netflix Reteam For Constitutional Documentary ‘14th’

EXCLUSIVE: A decade after Ava DuVernay‘s Oscar-nominated and Peabody Award-winning 13th debuted on Netflix, the filmmaker and the streamer are back together in the Constitutional business.

Spotlighting America’s long running and sometimes bloody battle with itself over who is a citizen and how much freedom they get, DuVernay’s documentary 14th is set to launch on Netflix later this year, I’ve learned.

“If 13th asked who gets caged, then 14th asks who gets counted,” DuVernay told Deadline of the upcoming documentary. “This is not a film about the past tense of freedom. I’m not interested in asking you to look back.”

Clearly revolving around the equal protection and citizenship-focused 14th amendment, which was ratified in 1868 in the turbulent era of Reconstruction and has been a contentious part of the American body politic ever since, the14th project from the Selma helmer has been in production discreetly for two years. Coming from Array Filmworks, 14th is produced by DuVernay, with longtime collaborators Spencer Averick, Tammy Garnes and Paul Garnes.

“The film asks what kind of country is being written beneath our feet now… while we’re busy believing the stories we’ve all been told,” DuVernay states.

To that, the director/producer sits down in 14th with members of Congress present and past such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), former GOP Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, and California’s current senior Senator Alex Padilla. The film also features interviews with sitting Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden (who Donald Trump fired in May 2025), former President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund president and Director-Counsel Sherrilyn Ifill, UC Irvine School of Law Korematsu Center for Law and Equality executive director Prof. Robert Chang, activist and past Georgia gubernatorial contender Stacey Abrams. Spanning the ideological divide, DuVernay spoke with left-wing Twitch-based cultural critic Hasan Piker and conservative In Defense of Populism: Protest and American Democracy author Donald T. Critchlow too.

Along with 13th, Netflix has been the home of DuVernay’s Emmy-winning When They See Us series from 2019 about the injustices against suspects in the 1989 Central Park jogger rape case. The streamer also launched DuVernay’s 2020 Colin in Black & White limited series about NFL icon Colin Kaepernick’s formative years.

“Ava’s remarkable ability to bring history into conversation with the present made her last documentary, the seminal BAFTA-winning and Academy Award-nominated 13th, a cultural touchstone of the last quarter century,” says Adam Del Deo, Netflix’s VP of Documentary Film and Series. “With 14th, she delivers another ambitious and thought-provoking documentary with the depth, artistry, and humanity that have come to define her work. We’re proud to continue our creative partnership with Ava and bring this powerful film to audiences around the world.”

In many ways a continuum in DuVernay’s often probing career with projects like 13th and WTSU, the essence of 14th is also reminiscent of the remarks the filmmaker made in 2025 upon accepting Great Americans Medal from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

In front of a DC crowd, including Smithsonian chief Lonnie Bunch III and the museum’s Elizabeth MacMillan Director Anthea M. Hartig, DuVernay noted “History is not a weapon to be sheathed when inconvenient. It is not a bedtime story meant to lull us to sleep. It is a river, flowing… deep and often turbulent.”

Sounds like America.