In the 1960s, long before selfies and iPhones, New York photographer Melissa Shook (1939–2020) was a white single mother living within a close-knit, multi-ethnic artist community on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Quietly and urgently, she documented the everyday life of her mixed-race daughter, Kristina “Krissy” Shook. Your Eyes and Love in Grain and Shadow is a 16-minute documentary that brings together Shook’s rarely seen photographs and recently developed, previously unseen Super 8 footage of Krissy learning to walk, dancing, playing, and growing up.
Intimate, poetic, tender, funny, and at times painful, these images reveal the evolving bond between mother and daughter—and the unspoken artistic collaboration that grew between them over nearly two decades. Narrated by Kristina Shook as if speaking directly to her late mother, the film moves across time through the textures of grain, shadow, memory, and absence. It offers a glimpse of girlhood, a vanished era of New York City, and the early experiments of a remarkable artist whose work anticipated today’s culture of self-documentation by decades.
Directed by Sarah Feinbloom, the film grew out of her decades-long friendship with Kristina Shook and Kristina’s promise to bring her mother’s work to a wider audience. After Melissa Shook’s death in 2020, previously unseen Super 8 reels were discovered in mislabeled boxes, revealing another dimension of her restless experimentation with still and moving images.
Released: February 2026
Running time: 16 minutes
Narration: Kristina Shook
Photographs and Super 8: Melissa Shook
Director: Sarah Feinbloom
Producers: Sarah Feinbloom, Kristina Shook, S.C. Smith, Goro Toshima Executive Producer: Nancy Lutz
Editor: Alex Regalado
Written by: Sarah Feinbloom, Kristina Shook, S.C. Smith
Music by: Caroline Shaw, John Montgomery, Yeonsuk Jung, and Kaitlin Miller
Production Companies: Sarafina Productions and Almont Media
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