What Remains

Synopsis

Eunetta is an expressionist short film that opens a window into one ordinary day in the life of Eunetta Wilkens as she tends to the needs of her employer, his suffragette wife, and their 3 year old daughter who have come from the North to Jefferson County, Alabama. Starting at sunrise, we wake with Eunetta and hear her inner monologue, the thoughts that occupy her mind throughout the day. Thoughts of her family, freed from slavery after the Civil War, who traveled on foot to Alabama from nearby Georgia, their worldly belongings strapped to a mule, in search of work and the rickety hopes of a life on their own terms. Conflicted feelings about the role of God in a world of stark disparity. Curiosity about the “nigger school” for teachers over in Macon County, Alabama that the Mrs. tells her about. 

As Eunetta does the laundry, cooks supper, attends to her tolerant but imperious mistress, and cares for her employers’ child as though she were her own, her existence is liminal. She is at the center of the film, but exists somewhere in the background of this family’s life. Valued and removed, like the drapery. This reality is captured, quite literally, when a photographer comes to “take a moment” with the family and Mr. and Mrs. ask her to be in the photograph. Eunetta feels “like a mule on show… like a shadow on the wall.” 

But it’s evident that Eunetta cannot be contained in this photograph, that in this moment, in the limited way her employers understand her. In our final moments with her and her thoughts, she feels something beyond this moment—and we feel it with her. Something akin to hope.