Brown and editors Michael Bloch and Geoffrey Richman beautifully weave together disparate voices into a meditative chorus. But there is a searching, ruminative dialogue running throughout the film.
There are few certain answers supplied by “Descendant,” a film that carries the banner of Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground. The slave-trafficking financier of the Clotilda, Timothy Meaher, may have died more than a century ago, but his family is still a wealthy landowner in the area. For many of the descendants, it’s not a theoretical question. Emmett Lewis, a particularly soulful descendant of Africatown founder Cudjo Lewis, describes it as “a ghost story” told to him by his father, and one he tells his young daughters.Īt the same time, the ship’s finding raises other questions of justice and of reparations.
Instead, it was passed by word of mouth as local lore kept alive by descendants. The story went undocumented in history books. Those that came on the Clotilda were warned not to tell anyone of their trafficking. “Descendant” is in many ways about storytelling as a form of resistance. For “Descendant,” it’s a powerful illustration of how past and present perpetually intermingle in America. With the city’s highest industrial zoning regulations, Africatown has long been surrounded by factories and refineries, leading to pollution and high local cancer rates. Modern-day Africatown is, itself, evidence of how systematic racism can operate. Rated PG (for thematic material, brief language and smoking images). Netflix presents a documentary directed by Margaret Brown.
0 kommentar(er)
