THE ROOM OF SILENCE, ELOISE SHERRID, 2016

The Room of Silence,” 2016, dir. Eloise Sherrid, in collaboration with co-producers Olivia Stephens, Utē Petit, and Chantal Feitosa, and the organizing efforts of the student group Black Artists and Designers.

“The Room of Silence,” is a short documentary about race, identity and marginalization at the Rhode Island School of Design. Based on interviews conducted by myself and the campus organization Black Artists and Designers, this film contains well under a third of the stories we collected in March 2016, and an unknown fraction of the stories belonging to students we didn’t have a chance to meet with.

This video is meant to serve as a discussion tool and testimony on behalf of the growing student activist movement on our campus, and around the country. The video has been shown at faculty and departmental meetings, and its release online marks the next step in exposing these issues and fostering dialogue between students and school.

There are a lot of issues present in the extremely intersectional problem this video is attempting to tackle: issues that cannot and should not be simplified down and crammed into twenty minutes. Please consider this the first entry in a necessary conversation. - Eloise Sherrid