Watch the Emotional Trailer for Ava DuVernay’s First Film in Five Years

Ava DuVernay is finally back with a new movie — and she continues to make history.

When DuVernay's Selma was nominated in 2015 for Best Picture at the Oscars, it was the first film directed by a Black female director to achieve that distinction. And now with Origin, on which she serves as writer, director, and producer, DuVernay is set to become the first African-American female director to have a feature in competition at the Venice Film Festival when the film premieres on Wednesday.

After recently opening Michael Mann's Ferrari at Venice, NEON has acquired the rights to Origin and released the debut trailer. Inspired by author Isabel Wilkerson's 2020 nonfiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Origin stars Oscar nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (King Richard) as Wilkerson and features an impressive cast that also includes Jon Bernthal, Vera Farmiga, Audra McDonald, Nick Offerman, Blair Underwood, and Niecy Nash-Betts.

Here's the official synopsis: "While grappling with tremendous personal tragedy, Isabel sets herself on a path of global investigation and discovery. Despite the colossal scope of her project, she finds beauty and bravery while crafting one of the defining American books of our time."

DuVernay became a household name with her third feature film, Selma, which starred David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. Despite Selma earning a Best Picture nod, DuVernay was snubbed in the Best Director category, an omission that led to a public outcry. Her Selma follow-up, 2018's A Wrinkle in Time, was considered a commercial and critical failure, but DuVernay has been busy and successful in other mediums, as her 2016 documentary 13th was Oscar-nominated and she created the groundbreaking series Queen Sugar, which concluded its seven-year run last year.

"It was the summer of George Floyd's murder, and I was interrogating that in ways that were deeply personal," DuVernay told the New York Times of coming across Caste. "I had also just lost a loved one to Covid in the early, very scary time of Covid, which I think so many people have just forgotten about. But when you think of the spring and summer of 2020, it was shocking, it was frightening; people were dying alone in hospitals, which was the situation for my loved one. So when I read this book, I found it to have organizing principles to help me have something to anchor and hold onto as I thought about this crazy world we're in."

Origin opens in theaters later this year.