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Summary Descendant tells the story of the Clotilda - the last known ship to smuggle stolen Africans to America - the unthinkable cover-up, and the impact of that crime on generations of descendants living in Africatown. Once the past is revealed, can the future be reclaimed?
Directed By: Margaret Brown
Written By: Kern Jackson, Margaret Brown
Descendant
87
7.0
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Summary Descendant tells the story of the Clotilda - the last known ship to smuggle stolen Africans to America - the unthinkable cover-up, and the impact of that crime on generations of descendants living in Africatown. Once the past is revealed, can the future be reclaimed?
Directed By: Margaret Brown
Written By: Kern Jackson, Margaret Brown
Where to Watch
Coming Soon
Not available in your country?
ExpressVPN
Get 3 Extra months free
$6.67/mth
Top Cast
Metascore
Universal Acclaim Based on 13 Critic Reviews
87
100% Positive
13 Reviews
13 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Universal Acclaim Based on 13 Critic Reviews
87
100% Positive
13 Reviews
13 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Oct 21, 2022
Descendant is worth seeing no matter who you are. For viewers like me, however, it engenders the reality that, no matter how hard anyone tries to whitewash history, our stories will forever continue to be told in full, by us and for us.
Oct 20, 2022
There is a searching, ruminative dialogue running throughout the film. Brown and editors Michael Bloch and Geoffrey Richman beautifully weave together disparate voices into a meditative chorus.
User Score
Generally Favorable Based on 20 User Ratings
7.0
70% Positive
14 Ratings
14 Ratings
20% Mixed
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
10% Negative
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable Based on 20 User Ratings
7.0
70% Positive
14 Ratings
14 Ratings
20% Mixed
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
10% Negative
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
Report
Oct 21, 2022
What Descendant demonstrates is how ignoring the real story — the ship sunk to the bottom of the river by people who find its truths uncomfortable — doesn’t just steal people’s history from them. It impoverishes the future. More than that: without facing the past with courage, exploring it without succumbing to emotional panic, there is no future.
Oct 21, 2022
With remarkably immediate cinematography and an intimate understanding of its subjects, Descendant becomes an essential ideal of how to tell a community’s story: not through distant talking heads, but capturing moving bodies through land and history, giving a voice to those that can often feel powerless.
Oct 20, 2022
With Descendant, Brown wisely chooses to be respectfully, poetically alert instead of imposing, as her use of archival footage shot by Hurston suggests: She’s adding to a pioneering Black filmmaker’s anthropological empathy, updating the conversation, witnessing the witnessers.
Oct 21, 2022
A bit slow-moving at first, the history gives way to a thoughtful conversation about how best to remember this history and honor its victims, while simultaneously highlighting the modern science surrounding identifying the ship and, thanks to DNA, potentially linking its captives to their descendants.
Oct 31, 2022
With a single shot, Descendant ceases to be a story about the recovery of a ship. It rapidly morphs into something broader: a story about the land. Who owned it back in the 1800s, who owns it now, and what all of this means for everyone else.
Feb 6, 2023
Contrary to widely held belief, just because the US slave trade was outlawed in 1808, that didn’t end attempts to continue to import African slaves thereafter. It wasn’t until 1860, when the last slave ship, the Clotilde, entered American waters with a hold full of slaves that the practice finally came to an end. And, to conceal this crime, which was punishable by death, the perpetrators scuttled the ship by burning it upon arrival. The location of the wreckage long remained a mystery until a diving team found it in shallow water just north of Mobile, AL in 2018-19. But the discovery was more than just an archaeological curiosity; it was also significant to the descendants of the Clotilde slaves, many of whom settled in a nearby community called Africatown when they achieved freedom after the Civil War in 1865. Those living today now have actual proof of their African lineage, as well as evidence of the crime that was committed against their ancestors. Director Margaret Brown’s fourth feature outing explores this story from multiple angles in terms of its historic and personal importance, as well as from all of the fallout that stemmed from their ancestors’ experience that has carried through to this day. Given the myriad threads presented in this documentary, the focus admittedly could have been a little tighter in spots, particularly in terms of how the narrative’s many dots connect. But, that aside, the film effectively chronicles a little-known story that represents a significant benchmark in African-American history and a potential turning point in terms of how the American public at large views the question of this appalling institution and its after-effects, some of which have lingered but have gone virtually unaddressed and, arguably, even unrecognized all these years. This is a fine film that should be part of every grade school history class and a welcome addition to African-American History Month viewing.
Report
Oct 29, 2022
A fotografia do filme é linda, e a metáfora com o elemento marítimo funciona, afinal, foi na travessia de um oceano que toda essa história começou.
A edição deixou um pouco a desejar em suas variações, monótonas algumas vezes, poderiam, por exemplo, encurtar um pouco. Mas é inegável a força do argumento, e ainda de quebra você transforma a "Africatown" num espaço de resistência combinadas, para onde convergem as lutas antirracistas, ambientalistas, anticapacitistas, a favor da ciência, a favor da história e a favor da preservação das comunidades locais. É muito difícil equilibrar isso com a visão limitada que temos sobre o que é desenvolvimento.
É um filme que valoriza a tradição, o passado, o retorno às origens. Ver a superficialidade do mundo hoje, dominado pelo presente, cada vez mais ansioso, de certa forma torna a experiência um alento: o filme trata do processo histórico como forma de identificação de seu povo. E aos que construíram o "Clotilda" (o último navio negreiro que fora à América), restou-lhes o silêncio dos covardes.
Como brasileiro, sinto tanta falta disso, falta de espaços que tragam à lembrança nosso passado escravocrata, ou mesmo nosso passado ditatorial. Que o cinema seja sempre resistência!
Report
Production Company
- Higher Ground Productions
- Participant
- Two One Five Entertainment
Release Date Oct 21, 2022
Duration 1 h 49 m
Rating PG
Genres
Awards
Critics' Choice Documentary Awards
• 1 Win & 3 Nominations
Sundance Film Festival
• 1 Win & 2 Nominations
Austin Film Critics Association
• 1 Win & 2 Nominations
