Ava DuVernay to Bring Scripted Central Park Five Limited Series to Netflix

Oscar-nominated director and activist Ava DuVernay is continuing her exploration of the criminal justice system, this time with a limited series about the Central Park Five case, Variety reports.

The five-part series is slated to debut on Netflix in 2019, marking another partnership between the director and streaming service after her Oscar-nominated documentary 13th covered mass incarceration and systemic racism.

The series will chronicle the story of the five young black and Latino men wrongly convicted of brutally raping a woman jogging in the New York City park in 1989. Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise were freed in 2002 after DNA evidence proved they were not guilty of the heinous act.

As there is already a documentary on the case, DuVernay’s scripted series will tackle the case in a different way, spending each episode focusing on the individual story of each of the five men from the spring of 1989 to 2014, when the men were exonerated. DuVernay will write and direct each episode.

She will once again be working with Oprah Winfrey, who serves as executive producer of the project, as she has on Selma and Queen Sugar, which just entered its second season on OWN.

The limited series is sure to add fuel to the conversation DuVernay started last year with 13th, and considering Donald Trump adamantly called for the five young men to receive the death penalty and referred to them as guilty as recently as 2016, some early-morning anger tweets are to be expected come the release date.