HR 40 - A Bill proposing to study reparations for African Americans - has been in legislative limbo since 1989. But what do we really mean when we talk about reparations? What would it look like to try and undo generations of harm? Selina and Macky, two life-long friends, embark on a journey to answer these very questions. Selina, an African American woman, traces her ancestry to find that many of her ancestors were in fact sharecroppers, and comes face to face with the trauma that many of her family members experienced. Macky, her White life-long friend, faces up to the shameful truth that his ancestors were slaveholders, and that the childhood home he so fondly remembers was also a place of suffering for many enslaved people.

Through intimate interviews with their family members, many of them elders who remember very different times, we join the two friends on their truth-telling quest, mapping the many ways that the past is still present in their lives. More than just a call for a check, ACTS OF REPARATION invites us to reflect on our collective histories as a way to imagine what form true healing might take.

- Jennica Carmona