Whitewashed

WhiteWashed is a historical documentary essay examining the unresolved death of Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, and the institutional forces that shaped how her story — and history itself — were recorded. In 1905, Stanford moved to remove the university’s first president, David Starr Jordan, a leading advocate of eugenics whose ideas were widely accepted within American universities at the time. Weeks later, she fell violently ill and later died. The official explanation for her death would shift, while uncertainty was quietly absorbed by the institution she built. Rather than solving a murder, WhiteWashed explores how power stabilizes truth, how universities manage doubt, and how ideas rooted in eugenics were embedded in academic life between 1900 and 1940. More than a century later, as Stanford reckons with Jordan’s legacy, the film asks what it means when institutions correct symbols while deeper histories remain unresolved. AI-assisted tools were used in the production of Whitewashed to help reconstruct certain historical environments and visual references. These tools functioned only as creative instruments under human editorial control and were guided by documented archival sources.

Directed by Berry Minott (USA)