Hart Island is a small island in the East River that has served as NYC’s public burial grounds for 150+ years. It is the final resting place for 1 million unclaimed and indigent New Yorkers, as well as thousands of still born infants. Until very recently, families could not visit the graves of their loved ones and burials were carried out by inmates at Riker’s Island.

Set in 1985, “Hart Island” follows the lives of two people who have each lost a child and are unable to move beyond their grief. Charles, an incarcerated Black man at Riker’s Island who is selected to join the Hart Island burial crew will not allow himself to grieve the death of his young son. Marielena, a recent Dominican immigrant whose stillborn son is buried on Hart Island feels she cannot properly mourn her child because she cannot go to his gravesite.

Language barriers and bureaucracy led to her signing away her child’s remains for a free “city burial,” not knowing that he would be buried in a mass grave on an island she would never be able to visit. Wanting to learn to learn about the island where her son is buried, Marielena writes a letter to the Riker’s burial crew. As the new man on the crew, it falls on Charles to respond. Through their exchange of letters, Marielena learns Charles is the man who buried her child. She asks him to take a treasured baby blanket her family has passed down through generations and bury it near her son’s grave.

Mired in his own struggles and feeling as though he is failing his family, Charles refuses and gets himself kicked off of the burial crew. When Marielena makes a surprise visit to Rikers, all of Charles’ walls finally crumble as he details the systematic injustices and institutionalized racism, as well as his own choices, that brought him to this moment in time. Together, Charles and find healing by showing compassion to each other’s situations, allowing them to move forward with their lives.