When Melanie Brooks' surgeon father was infected with HIV from a blood transfusion in 1985, stigma and misinformation about HIV/AIDS at the time forced them to keep his illness a secret for the ten years before his death in 1995. A HARD SILENCE is Brooks' journey, twenty years later, to finally understand the consequences of her family's silence, to interrogate the roots of stigma and discrimination responsible for the ongoing secret-keeping, and to show how she's now learned to be authentic.