Ava DuVernay takes the 13th Amendment - the one that supposedly ended slavery - and shows how a single clause (“except as a punishment for crime…”) laid the foundations for mass incarceration. It’s history, law, politics, and pop culture, woven into a thriller-paced documentary.

The film uses graphics, archive and interviews not as wallpaper but as a symphony - every cut has rhythm. Stats turn into weapons and the words of politicians play back like a sinister chorus.

13th is not a lecture; it’s a rising tidal wave of incontrovertible truth. DuVernay keeps tightening the screw — from reconstruction to Jim Crow to Nixon to Clinton to today. It’s a masterclass in pacing: you feel the inevitability of the system, and the urgency of change.

It’s a broad cast: activists, academics, former prisoners, conservative voices too. Everyone is given dignity of space, framed as part of the truth-telling.

The film entered classrooms, movements, and policy debates. It didn’t just win awards — it gave people vocabulary. “The prison-industrial complex” became kitchen table conversation.

13th shows that clarity is power.

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At The Good Side Productions, we move fluidly between formats — explainer videos, mid-length insight films, campaign assets, and feature documentaries — always with the same goal: to make complex issues cut through.

That’s why 13th is one of the primary influences for our feature documentary, Out Laws, through which we too reveal an injustice through centuries of hidden histories. See more here.

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