American Graveyard is a feature-length documentary uncovering the untold piece of American history, beginning with Cherry Lane Cemetery, a 19th-century African-American burial ground on Staten Island, New York. Once the resting place of free and formerly enslaved people from New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and the Carolinas, Cherry Lane was bulldozed and paved over in the 1950s to make way for a Shell station, then a shopping plaza.

Through archival footage, letters, and courtroom testimonies—alongside on-camera interviews with descendants, historians, and community advocates—American Graveyard exposes how one cemetery’s destruction mirrors a national pattern of displacement and erasure. The film traces the story from the site’s beginnings in 1850 to the present-day fight for recognition and repair.

Directed by filmmaker Heather Quinlan (If These Knishes Could Talk: The Story of the NY Accent; Spoke; Dinner with Wise Guys), American Graveyard is both an act of remembrance and an investigation into how America builds over its past—and who is left beneath the pavement.