I don't want to say that in a place that's negative about what the fear is. I just want to be a realist.

Film school was a privilege I could not afford.

By the end of the documentary [ '13th'], you really understand what prison is, what the prison industrial complex is, where this whole Black Lives Matter movement comes from, the history of resistance, the history of how politicians have used criminality over the decades for a particular political gain. It's to give people an understanding of it so they can make their own decisions about how they want to be in the world.

I think it's a wonderful time to be a black woman who makes films. It's a good time to be an artist period. Traditional models of making and consuming art are breaking down and being rebuilt. I find that to be incredibly exciting as a filmmaker and film marketer.

I feel like it had an impact, in that it started the attention that has been paid to what was happening. It started to get us into this whole conversation about prison reform, the whole bipartisan dialogue that's been happening over the past five, six years about this, where you have a Van Jones and a Newt Gingrich, and you have the Rick Perrys and so forth getting up and talking about the need to reform.

Working full-time as a filmmaker has been a dream come true.

I did not have any problem with speaking up because my mother, my family, my grandmother, my aunt - I grew up in a family dominated by women - always encouraged me to do so. And if a girl is unafraid, then the world is her oyster.