Sundance: 'Descendant' chronicles a Black history uncovered
26.01.2022 - 01:07
/ abcnews.go.com
NEW YORK -- Rarely have past and present mingled in a documentary the way they do in “Descendant,” a nonfiction account of the last known ship to bring African captives to the American South for enslavement.Margaret Brown's “Descendant," which recently premiered at the virtual Sundance Film Festival, chronicles the discovery of the ship, a 90-foot-long wooden schooner that was secretly burned and sunk near Mobile, Alabama, after it was used to illegally take and enslave 100 Africans on a trip across the Atlantic in the mid-19th century, decades after the international slave trade had been outlawed.“Descendant” closely documents the finding of the Clotilda, which was confirmed in 2019. For locals, it's a long overdue affirmation of a long-obscured history that for a century was little spoken of.
The Mobile River site is effectively a 160-year-old crime scene of America's original sin, where in 1860 Timothy Meaher, their enslaver, and the ship's captain, William Foster, submerged the evidence.But Brown's expansive, ruminative documentary is more focused on the questions of heritage, history and justice that the Clotilda unravels for its descendants and the community of Africatown, the town outside Mobile created by many of those enslaved from the Clotilda.“The story of the ship is just the tip of the iceberg,” Brown said in an interview. “It’s not even really the story.
The ship is kind of like the inciting incident.”Africatown was designated as a historic district in 2009 but has been long blighted by a paper plant and pollution; zoning protections came much too late for its residents. In “Descendant,” the Africatown's present is deeply and plainly related to its past.Brown grew up in Mobile, and has previously documented
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