Ava DuVer­nay will hon­our Nipsey Hus­sle in a new documentary

Last March, the assas­si­na­tion of Los Ange­les-bred musi­cian Nipsey Hus­sle at the age of 33 sent shock­waves through the rap world. While some­what less­er-known than peers like Kendrick Lamar or Drake, Nip was a rapper’s rap­per, respect­ed and esteemed by those who knew the scene best. His loss left a crater, a grief illus­trat­ed by the 20,000-strong crowd at his pub­lic memo­r­i­al last spring by the Sta­ples Center.

Last night, Dead­line broke the news that Nipsey Hus­sle will soon receive anoth­er trib­ute, of a less ephemer­al sort. Ava DuVer­nay has signed on to direct a doc­u­men­tary about the life and times of the rhyme-spit­ting lumi­nary, and a bid­ding war con­clud­ed with Net­flix hold­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion rights.

While Deadline’s arti­cle makes this all sound like the out­come of a hot­ly con­test­ed nego­ti­a­tion, DuVernay’s return to Net­flix hard­ly reg­is­ters as a shock; she’s bud­died up with the stream­ing giant for the incar­cer­a­tion doc­u­men­tary 13^th as well as the recent Cen­tral Park Five minis­eries When They See Us. The as-of-now unti­tled film will be DuVernay’s first return to non­fic­tion fea­ture film­mak­ing since she released 13^th back in 2016.

Nipsey Hus­sle had more street cred than any­one, pre­fer­ring to do things the old-school way by flood­ing the mar­ket with a steady stream of mix­tapes rather than devot­ing all his atten­tion to a stu­dio album. (His great­est claim to fame: Jay‑Z bought 100 lim­it­ed-edi­tion copies of the tape Cren­shaw at $100 a pop.) Nipsey also had a well-known entre­pre­neur­ial streak, sit­ting as a part­ner on the suc­cess­ful Marathon Cloth­ing store in LA — a true renais­sance man.

The most intrigu­ing detail of the sto­ry may be that Nipsey Hussle’s estate reached out direct­ly to DuVer­nay to stew­ard this project, hav­ing been impressed with her work in the past and her pas­sion for Nip’s lega­cy. As a vote of con­fi­dence for her skill and her author­i­ty on the sub­ject, that’s as good a place to start as any.