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DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

HOW THEY SEE US

How They See Us was born from a question that refused to leave me alone:
What happens to a human being when their pain is constantly witnessed—but never acknowledged?

This film is not about spectacle. It is about presence.

So often, stories about slavery rely on extremes—violence shown loudly, suffering explained explicitly. While those truths matter, they can also create distance. They allow viewers to brace themselves, to categorize the past as something horrific yet safely concluded.

I wanted to do the opposite.

This micro-drama lives in the quiet moments—the pauses, the glances, the rooms where no one screams because screaming changes nothing. The fields where backs bend not just from labor, but from the weight of being seen as less than human. The rooms where power doesn’t need to raise its voice because it already owns the silence.

The title, How They See Us, is intentional. This is not a story about identity as the enslaved defined it for themselves, but about imposed perception—how systems of power decide what a person is worth, what they are allowed to feel, and what violence is considered “normal.”

The camera never rushes. It watches. Sometimes uncomfortably. Because history was uncomfortable. And because the act of looking—really looking—is part of the reckoning.

This film asks the audience to sit with restraint:
Restraint as survival.Restraint as resistance.Restraint as a form of dignity that could not be stolen.

There is no catharsis here. No easy release. That is by design. The absence of resolution mirrors the lived reality of those whose stories were never given closure.

How They See Us is not meant to accuse the viewer.It is meant to invite responsibility—to witness without turning away, to feel without consuming, and to recognize how the echoes of these perceptions still shape the present.

This is a small film with a heavy purpose.And it exists so that silence, for once, can speak truth.

— Director

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