On ARRAY’s 10th Anniversary, Ava DuVernay Reflects On A Decade of Disruption & Her Own Unconscious Bias

essence.com:

I Will Follow, Ava DuVernay noticed that her low-budget independently made film was fighting an uphill battle. A battle her white counterparts didn’t have to fight.

So she had an idea. She figured that if she could self-distribute her own project successfully, she could use the same model to do so for others.  “[I thought] what if I created a pipeline so it can be a collective distribution?” DuVernay told ESSENCE. “Why don’t we use the money from one film to go into the next person’s film?

So all that we do for ARRAY is really built off of I Will Follow. All of those filmmakers–it’s almost 40 of them– each of them is living off the seed money from I Will Follow.