SKYLARK

After a decade of fighting for racial justice within Washington, DC’s philanthropic sector, Dr Yanique Redwood reaches a point her professional achievements can no longer disguise. The accumulated stress of anti-Black racism—what researchers describe as weathering—has taken a physical toll on her body.

Skylark begins with that recognition and follows Redwood as she steps away from high-profile leadership roles in the United States. What might appear from the outside as retreat becomes something more radical: a refusal to sacrifice her health to institutions that demand endless resilience while reproducing the conditions causing harm.

Director Mignotae Kebede expands Redwood’s journey through the experiences of D’Lynn Jacobs and Temi F. Bennett, tracing the shared and distinct ways racism and misogynoir shape Black women’s lives from childhood into adulthood. The film moves across the United States, Trinidad and Jamaica, connecting workplace experience, family memory, geography and the body.

Rather than presenting healing as a tidy personal solution to a structural problem, Skylark creates space for complexity. Lyrical images of movement and water sit alongside intimate testimony. Breath, softness and rest become cinematic languages of their own—forms of resistance in a world that too often values Black women primarily for endurance, labour and service.

Loosely adapted from Redwood’s memoir White Women Cry and Call Me Angry, Skylark is both an urgent social-issue documentary and a quiet meditation on liberation. It asks what becomes possible when survival is no longer the final goal, and when Black women are allowed to imagine lives defined not merely by coping, but by wholeness.

WHY YOU’LL WANT TO SEE IT
* An Australian Premiere with Dr Yanique Redwood attending the festival.
* Poetic visual storytelling that centres breath, water, movement and rest.
* An essential starting point for conversations about workplace culture and misogynoir.