Ava DuVernay Addresses A.I. Use in New Netflix Documentary ‘14th:’ “People Should See This”

It’s been 10 years since DuVernay’s award-winning documentary, 13th. Now, the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning director is back with a new companion documentary, 14th, which screened for press and industry ahead of its world premiere at New York Film Festival on Friday, October 9.

A lot has changed (and not changed) in the decade since 13th, which released via Netflix in 2016. One major difference? This time around, DuVernay employed the use of generative artificial intelligence to animate archival photographs featured in the documentary.

Directed and produced by DuVernay via her ARRAY production company, 14th is a companion piece to 13th, DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated documentary about the prison industrial complex, through the lens of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Similarly, 14th examines the Fourteenth Amendment—which addresses rights related to citizenship, voting, insurrection, and more—and the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, connecting it to the current administration’s attacks on those rights.

There’s an extended portion of the film that—while explaining the rise of Black Americans in politics and civil life following the end of slavery—features black-and-white, archival photos that have been “brought to life.” The subjects of the once-still photos blink, laugh, and fidget, just as they might on film. Anyone with a Facebook feed will recognize the eerie, uncanny vibe that indicates the use of generative AI.

In the press conference that followed the press and industry screening of 14th at NYFF on Friday morning, a member of the audience, who did not identify themselves, asked DuVernay to “address the use of AI in some of the archival footage.”

DuVernary did not deny the use of AI in her response, in which she explained that she wanted to recreate a “3D” effect that she experienced while her team was gathering these old photos.

“One of the things I was really interested in was this thing that I had discovered when we were researching—some photos we have to watch through stereoscopic photography. You could only look at it through a certain viewfinder, two photos side by side,” DuVernay explained. “When you put them in this machine—that used around the time of the Civil War, very popular—they create an effect where it was like 3D. If you move, they move. It was like, ‘My god. People should see this.'”

DuVernay continued, “When I went to the artists who were doing our photoscoping, and our parallax, and our animation process—there’s some of that technology that is in their tools. It creates a similar effect to the stereoscope. That was the goal for that, and that’s why we used it.”

14th will open in select theaters on November 27, and will stream globally on Netflix on December 4, 2026.