amy: that is isabel wilkerson. you can go to why you decided to start with trayvon martin and as you said, actually you hear george zimmerman's voice. . when i was interviewing miss wilkerson about her process in writing the book, she shared that the verdict of the case against george zimmerman was a seminal moment in her curiosity and in her quest to put together the thesis and try to pursue this notion of caste and explaining it to folks. i wanted to begin where she began. in the film, you see it opens with a day in the life of a teenager named trayvon. you are walking with him as he is going about his business talking to a friend on the phone, going to buy a snack. those few minutes you see him before anything happens to him, before he is stopped and assaulted and killed, are moments to can -- constructed to humanize him and allow you to learn a little bit about him outside of the context of what was done to him. that was important to me in any rendering of challenge and trauma to make sure we're doing exactly w

because we are in this wild era where isabel wilkerson's work is being banned, where 1619 project ise passing laws to stop people from reading history and understanding particularly black history and lgbtq history. but it's intense. what do you want people to walk out of that theater with in this time? >> well, it's important for us, we made the film independently, in 37 days on three continents. we broke all of the rules in terms of the ways in which we're told to make this inside a studio system, don't say this, don't press too hard. we were able to freely express what we wanted to and accelerate the timeline of the movie so it's out before the elections this year. we want to contribute to a conversation that is an urgent matter for folks to raise their voices and talk about books being banned, history being rewritten or completely disregarded, ridiculous statements being made by candidates and politicians that are going unchallenged. underreporting of some of the asinine comments being made on the campaign trail. and so as an artist all i can do is make my heart. i'm a filmmaker,

so i haven't but a lot of history but a lot of historians have i know a lot of people like isabel wilkerson's on the warmth of suns i like it to but she already wrote that book. i felt i was writing on an earlier period. well, i'm eager to read this. you so much. thank you for coming and for your question. thank you. and i look forward to reading your book. i wonder if could address whether there was a big disparity between the deep south and the upper south in terms this kind of behavior, in terms of the violence like it's occurring over, the sort of larger history of emancipation and reconstruction and i think it's an important question, but i think what we have acknowledge is that confederate and, even those people who are in the border states who didn't see release black people from bondage reluctantly, they're not enthusiastic about it and so this violence is part a larger freedom denying enterprise and so it's happening everywhere. it's in tennessee, it's in kentucky which it didn't succeed. it's in texas. you see this sort of everyday that's deliberately targeting black and, taking the