A 4-Year Journey

The Day Black Women Decided to Take a 4-Year Vacation is an ongoing chronicle, unfolding over four years. During this time, the project will trace how Black women’s experiences, choices, and emotional landscapes evolve in response to the social and political realities of our time.

Through travel and conversation across the United States, we will meet with Black women from different walks of life, listening to their reflections on rest, resistance, resilience, hope, work, and community. Each encounter adds another layer to a living record of what it means to navigate uncertainty while holding on to both purpose and peace.

This is not a static film; it is a growing document of how Black women adapt, imagine, and continue, even when the ground beneath them keeps shifting.

About the Documentary

  • The Story.

    The Day Black Women Decided to Take a 4-Year Vacation follows the personal and collective journeys of Black women who made the radical choice to pause, to rest, reflect, and reclaim their sense of self in a culture that rarely grants that permission.

    Through intimate storytelling and visual honesty, the documentary explores what happens when exhaustion gives way to clarity, when silence becomes strategy, and when care becomes resistance.

  • The Moment.

    Filmed in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, the documentary captures the emotional and political landscape that shaped this moment. Against the backdrop of shifting leadership, public disillusionment, and collective fatigue, many Black women began asking new questions about their own limits, identities, and well-being.

    These conversations reveal the quiet, often unseen labor of strength, and the courage it takes to step back without apology.

  • The Vision.

    Created and directed by Dr. Jasmine Ross, a psychologist and storyteller, this film bridges research and art to document a historical shift in how Black women are reimagining rest. Each narrative offers both data and depth, lived evidence that rest is not an interruption, but an inheritance.

    The Day Black Women Decided to Take a 4-Year Vacation is a mirror and a message. It reminds us that the power to pause is the power to begin again.

Our Stories, Told by Us

Storytelling has always been a way for Black women to record truth, preserve memory, and make sense of what history often overlooks. In a moment defined by exhaustion and change, it matters who tells the story and how it is told. The Day Black Women Decided to Take a 4-Year Vacation centers the voices of Black women themselves, unfiltered, reflective, and deeply personal, to ensure that this chapter in our collective experience is witnessed through our own lens.