Hart Island: An American Cemetery
Director: Melinda Hunt
Co-production: Banff New Media Institute
Music: Fred Hersch
Runtime: 66 minutes
Synopsis
Hart Island is America's largest cemetery where three quarters of a million people have been buried in mass graves on 101 acres of an island in the Bronx. Four families struggle to sort out how their relative ended up on Hart Island. They confront social stigma, outdated policies, police oversights and complacency. They defy the assumption that no one cares about people buried in the potter's field.
At the end of a long journey through a labyrinth of city agencies: the NYPD, the Office of the Medical Examiner, and the NYC Department of Correction they locate a truth about how easily people become lost. They struggle 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.
Each family represents a larger group of who is buried on Hart Island: infants, immigrants, victims of disease and epidemics and victims of crime.Their stories are separated into chapters within the Nineteenth Century poem by Walt Whitman, "Leaves of Grass." This poem is set to music composed by Fred Hersch and sung by Kurt Elling. It portrays the beauty and darkness of Hart Island that is unchanged since Whitman's lifetime.
Hart Island is the last undeveloped one hundred acres in New York City, a place abundant nature. Yet, it carries a primal fear of being forgotten. The burial place of three quarters of a million people, it represents a democracic as well as the looming flipside of the American Dream.
A rough cut was completed in 2002. Second cut completed in 2007.
About the Director
Melinda Hunt is an interdisciplinary artist whose works include video, photography, installation, and public art. She graduated from Reed College in 1981. She received a M.F.A. in Sculpture (1985) from the Yale School of Art and a M.Sc. in Digital Imaging & Design (2007) from New York University. She founded the Hart Island Project in 1991. She published a book Hart Island (1998) in a collaboration with photographer Joel Sternfeld. She has received awards from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts (1987), New York State Council on the Arts (1995, 2000) and Canada Council for the Arts (2008).
Additional Information
In 1991, Melinda Hunt began visiting Hart Island with Joel Sternfeld to photograph document the burials and the abandoned prison island. She worked with inmates to obtain testimonials of the process. In 1994, she began to negotiate with the Department of Correction in New York City to travel to Hart Island with relatives of the buried. In 1999 she took two people, Paul and Pat, whose common tie was two relatives buried on Hart Island. The documentary begins with this trip and continues with new interviews on the present website of families who make the journey to Hart Island.
In 2002, Arnie Charnick contacted Melinda about going to Hart Island to spread his mother's ashes. Arnie has chosen to bury his brother, Ray, a drug addict who died of AIDS in 1997, on Hart Island. He wanted to reunite his family. By the time, permission was granted, Arnie's father had died.
In 1982 Rose Lorenz was buried as Unknown White Female after her body was discovered floating in the Hudson River. She was disinterred twenty years later and her boyfriend was charged with murder. In 2005 he was convicted of aggravated manslaughter in accordance with 1982 laws. Due to statute of limitations on old manslaughter laws he could not be sentenced. Phyllis, his sister tells the story of how she help him dump the body in the river and then turned him in after 20 years.
Interviews include: Tom Antenen, Deputy Commissioner, NYC Dept of Correction Ken Jackson, Historian, Columbia University Peggy Cauldwell-Ott, Forensic Anthropologist Alan Olson, Former Inmate, Hart Island Burial Detail Patrick Walsh, Correction Officer