Coming to theatres today, Friday, February 8:
ONE MILLION AMERICAN DREAMS
Director:
Brendan Byrne
Premiere:
Galway 2018
Select Festivals:
Cork
About:
A revealing look at a NYC island that’s the final resting place for the poor and forgotten.
Restricted from public access, the 101 acres of Hart Island serve as a potter’s field, a cemetery for the unclaimed dead, buried each week by Rikers Island inmates. While not a secret, the location is little known to the ordinary residents of NYC – unless unfortunate circumstances arise with family members, as revealed in the heartbreaking stories of four of the forgotten souls who were consigned to Hart Island as their final resting place. Not only representative of the more than a million bodies lain to rest there, these profiles also expose problematic practices by the city and the medical examiner’s office – failure to notify surviving family members, or, in an extreme case, the loss of an infant’s body. Though somewhat diffuse, and hampered by a plodding score, Brendan Byrne’s project is otherwise well-produced and a respectful meditation on the ill treatment of those on the margins, in death as in life.
what (not) to doc 