At its core, this doc is about celebrating cultural diversity and women’s strength in the face of marginalization and displacement. With an almost entirely female crew, and three generations of Indo-Carib women on screen, we're dedicated to creating spaces of healing and visibility in media.

                                       A Brief Introduction

Body Subpoena--an experimental documentary--is a visual re-examination of my girlhood. Guided by years of personal poetry and rooted in a character study of my childhood home, a space unearthed and built by the backbone of my immigrant grandmother and the home to the three daughters she brought with her, carries with it the duality of dislocation and strength.

 

 This is also the very home I grew into a woman and is also the site of my own sexual trauma. 

 

Through three different accounts of living in this house, I am documenting through three generations of women who have been displaced from their origins (the origin of the home, the origin of the mother, the origin of the body) and hope to explore the duality of women like us who are not afforded the platform to be recognized for the strength and history we carry. 

 

The relationship between traumatic memory and the way our bodies remember, repress, and reproduce that untapped violence is visually explored through the youngest woman in the film who comes to terms with her own individual sexual and childhood trauma alongside the three different accounts; with the ultimate goal of showing how when one woman shares her truth, she makes room for other truths to be shared. This is not a story about healing, rather about what reclamation and resilience look and feels like in an unapologetic way. 

                                                           

 

This film is a real-time reflection and investigation of finding ourselves again; to uncover what was unknown but acutely felt by the women in my life---as I unpack the relationship between my body and the history of words passed onto me, and the ones I am striving to make for myself. 

 

I hope to capture these women in their everyday lives, allowing moments to present themselves, showcasing the beauty that daily coexists with pain, as I have always seen them through and not through any recreation of pain. 

 

The nature of trauma that is often overlooked is it simultaneously defies and demands witness. This piece, where my first mass undertaking of presenting my whole self, will be that witness. 

 

 

 

                                           

 

                                                Why we need your help!

With two-thirds of the film practically completed, we need your help to push us past the finish line! The significance of origin and roots require our team to travel to Guyana, a Caribbean country that serves as the origin of all the women in the film. The goal is to revisit the places detailed in interviews and to use these visuals to signify the relationship of past and present; between landscape and body--between what growing up was then and what it is now.

 

As the documentary aims to show a growing comprehension of my identity--one that is marked by a strong matriarchal history--of women and land--specifically brown women in the Indo-Caribbean culture of Guyana--revisiting where it all started from is integral to that comprehension.

                 

                       There is power in roots and we need your help to visualize that reality.