Our Daisy

Our Daisy explores the story of Daisy B. Davis, a teenage girl who lost her life to the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. A working-class girl from a troubled home, Daisy left behind few archival traces, and those offer more questions than answers. This film meditates on the memory and legacy of pandemics, reaching into Daisy's past for a new perspective on our post-pandemic present.

Our Daisy is structured around experimental audio collages, abstract archival sequences, and lyrical imagery of Daisy’s gravesite. The audio collages feature conversations with folks in Daisy's home community grappling with the archival fragments of her life. The dynamic of these conversations always felt experimental. Stories of the 1918 Influenza and the lives it took — like Daisy’s — are hard to retrace. They’re even hard to talk about. In Our Daisy, my collaborators and I experimented with what it felt like to keep going anyway, to keep talking, to keep asking about Daisy even when her archival trail went cold.