In January, Ava DuVernay became the first African-American woman to win Sundance's best directing award for her second feature-length film, Middle of Nowhere. The film is about a young black woman named Ruby, who puts her life and dreams of going to medical school on hold while her husband is in prison.
In her research for the film, DuVernay conducted interviews with women whose partners were incarcerated, and was surprised to find that many of these women didn't feel like victims. "This isn't just something that was happening to them that they had to go along with," she tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "This was something that they could stay or they could go — and they decided to stay."
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Ava DuVernay also directed the documentary My Mic Sounds Nice: The Truth About Women in Hip Hop.