Picture the Homeless

Directed by Melinda Hunt

Hart Island is a documentary about America’s largest cemetery where over three quarters of a million people have been buried since the American Civil War. It is a story told from the perspective of four families people who manage to overcome social stigma, outdated policies and police oversights and who refuse to fit the assumption that no one cares about people buried in the potter's field. This film shows them at the end of a long journey through a labyrinth of city agencies the NYPD, the Office of the Medical Examiner, the Health and Hospitals Corporation and the Department of Correction. Their goal is to perform the most basic grieving rituals: visiting a grave, spreading the parents' ashes, locating a body mistakenly buried, searching the records and seeking justice.

The film makes visible a place that is invisible. In fact, Hart Island is not a particularly scary place. It is the last undeveloped hundred acres in New York City, a place abundant with birds and vegetation. Yet it carries a deep-seated cultural fear of being forgotten. The burial place of so many, it represents the flipside of the American Dream.

for more information, visit hartisland.org