Quaker

Director’s Statement: During my fourteen years at Brooklyn Friends School, I sat in about five hundred Quaker meetings. In meeting, a community sits in silence for an hour. At any time during meeting, a community member can stand up and share a message. After they sit down, the room sits in silence for an extended period of time, processing that message until the next person stands. During my time at BFS, students shared messages of grief, social action, and even humor. Speaking your mind, or speaking “truth to power,” was encouraged. Sitting in silence with my classmates and listening to their words served as an integral part of my week—like breathing. For most young people, the opportunity to have the space for reflection among their classmates and the empowerment to speak as an equal within their community feels foreign—especially in high school. I set Quaker during the final meeting of the year, a time where seniors use the meeting to reflect on an important period of their life that’s about to pass. While making this film, I also looked back upon this time in my life—a time that only now, ten years later, can I fully understand its fleeting importance. To convey this feeling of looking into the past, I chose to shoot the film in black and white, to emulate the feeling of flipping through a yearbook.