A New England Document

A New England Document is a portrait of Lorna, Laurence and the politics of their visual archive — told with Elizabeth through their photos along with excerpts from diaries and their daughter’s writing.

Overview

Using selected images and text from the Marshall Archive at the Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, A New England Document reconstructs the impulse of two ethnographers' photographic endeavours in the Kalahari Desert, Namibia, from the reparative perspective of its (formerly) silenced stories. The filmmaker, a Black international student at Harvard, and their daughter, NYT-bestselling writer Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, give voice in fragmentary counterpoint upon the haunting sounds of archival ghosts — of future possibility arising from once known pasts.