Quiet as It’s Kept (2023)
Ja’Tovia Gary
Quiet as It’s Kept, Ja’Tovia Gary, USA, S8 & 16mm > digital, 26 min, 2023
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 colourism 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.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Art Windsor-Essex and Kinopravda Institute.
Image credits: artworks and stills courtesy of the artist © Ja’Tovia Gary. Portrait courtesy © JerSean Golatt.
About the artist
Ja’Tovia Gary (USA) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation born in Dallas in 1984. Gary’s multivalent works seek to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity, applying what scholar and cultural critic bell hooks terms “an oppositional gaze” as both maker and critical spectator of moving images. She received her MFA in Social Documentary Filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts, New York (2014). Her work has been exhibited at festivals and museums worldwide including The Museum of Modern Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Austrian Film Museum, New Orleans Film Festival, Hammer Museum, Open City Documentary Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Anthology Film Archives, Film at Lincoln Center, and Harvard Film Archives, winning awards from Locarno Film Festival and BlackStar Film Festival, as well as from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Block Museum and Studio Museum in Harlem. She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Creative Capital, Field of Vision, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She has taught courses in direct animation and cameraless filmmaking at Mono No Aware in Brooklyn and was a founding member (2013) of New Negress Film Society, a collective of Black women filmmakers. She lives and works in Dallas, Texas.