Staring at the Dark is a documentary film about Black ancestral and living landscapes. The project will document evening, natural and architectural landscapes through interviews with six Black residents from the east side of Panama City, Florida in the historic area of Bay Harbor, a once thriving Black, working class community. Of the areas severely damaged by Hurricane Michael in 2018, Black neighborhoods were completely transformed, enduring multiple layers of mourning before the storm. Our project will use video, digital projection, sculpture and installation to document the daily lives of these six “memory keepers” living in the almost forgotten Bay Harbor. Bay Harbor Artists Society will produce and film a series of miniature architectural sculptures, made from locally sourced materials, as inquiry and experimentation, based on the stories of the six individuals. Each miniature will be exposed to weather and filmed at dusk at installation sites. Bay Harbor Artists Society will invite community members at multiple stages of the film to imagine each place. Community engagement will involve communal storytelling, family collections of photos and videos, and placemaking workshops for installations. Community collaborations will support the atmosphere for nighttime documentation of video projections of photos and home videos from local collections onto different neighborhood environments. Audiences will view Florida’s ecological, political landscape through a documentary that explores unforgotten places, spirituality and memory, and the effects of time on Black creative labor and reconstruction.