In Ava DuVernay’s latest film, Origin, which held its U.S. premiere at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville on Friday, the filmmaker wrestles with a lot of big ideas. For the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker behind Selma, 13th and When They See Us, tackling big questions about race, class and history is nothing new — but for her latest feature, she admits she had to break a lot of established filmmaking rules to bring the story of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson to the screen.

Taking inspiration from Wilkerson’s acclaimed 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, DuVernay’s film is partly a portrait of Wilkerson — played in the film by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who recently earned a Gotham Award nom for her role in the film — as she embarks on an intellectual journey across time and place to connect how social hierarchies in distinctly different cultures across the globe are connected,...