Through glimpses into her childhood, a jeweler reckons with the roots of her work — confronting her belonging in America.

Quiet As It’s Kept (2023) is a contemporary cinematic response to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s first novel. An evocative illustration of the everyday particulars of colorism and its ravaging effects on the intramural, the film collages together vintage Hollywood, direct animation, original super 8 and 16mm film footage, and repurposed social media clips. The film considers questions around the book’s themes of internalized and externalized anti-blackness in contemporary culture.

Moments of resistance are collapsed and woven together; from documentation of the Indigenous led occupation of Alcatraz, to the reclamation of Cahokia and the repatriation of the ancestors, to one’s reflections on their body as they exist in the world today.