Exile holds a special promise for the alienated intellectual and artist. Leaving your homeland and settling elsewhere is a transformative act, rebellious and healing all at once. Living as an expatriate is a thumb in the eye of your native country as well as a big self-hug, reassuring you that this new place will understand you and nurture your work. So many literary exiles have felt estranged at home and found that new homes, perhaps in their strangeness, produced better work.

Writer-Director Ava DuVernay’s second feature, Middle of Nowhere, is all about faces—black faces in extreme close-up.