Sundance review: 'Descendant' gives a thoughtful, powerful look at a slave ship's voyage and the people still living in its wake

It’s not easy to inject nuance into a two-hour documentary, but director Margaret Brown does so carefully and beautifully in “Descendant,” a look at how one crime of the past creates echoes in our present.

The launch point for “Descendant” is the Clotilde, believed to be the last slave ship to deposit kidnapped Africans in the United States. The importing of slaves was abolished in 1808, and the Clotilde legendarily brought 105 souls from Africa (what is now the country of Benin) in 1860 — because, it’s said, of a bet that Alabama businessman Timothy Meaher made that he could violate the law and bring Africans to be sold into slavery. The ship arrived in Mobile, the Africans were taken to land, and Capt. William Foster then burned the ship to hide the evidence.

Brown, a Mobile native herself, traces the efforts, aided by the National Geographic Society, to find the Clotilde. She talks to a diver who tells of having “to listen to the ancestral voices” of those who were carried in those ships. She talks to a folklorist who keeps the tapes of descendants of the Clotilde’s captives, which kept the story alive when many in Mobile wanted to keep it quiet.

Most importantly, Brown airs the voices of the current residents of Africatown, the community near Mobile founded by those descendants. They speak, in interviews and town meetings, of their mixed response to the possible discovery of the Clotilde — which could bring tourism to the town, but also another chance for the white Mobile population to sanitize history all over again.

One of the more stirring parts of “Descendant” are the scenes where Brown asks some of those descendants to read passages from “Barracoon,” the long-lost work by author and anthropologist Zora Neal Hurston. In 1927, Hurston interviewed the last survivor of the Clotilde, Cudjoe Lewis, and wrote his recollections down in his own dialect. The book was finished in 1931, but remained unpublished until 2018 — a sign of how incendiary the history of slavery has been and still is.

Brown addresses the current concerns of Cudjoe’s descendants — including the industrial wasteland that has grown up around Africatown, and how the Meahers (who declined to participate in the film) remains one of Mobile’s leading families. 

That’s a lot to pack into 108 minutes, and Brown does it with precision and empathy. She does it by letting Cudjoe’s kin tell the bulk of the story, letting them reclaim their shared legacy from those who might try to spruce it up and present it without rough edges or uncomfortable truths. “Descendant” becomes, then, not just a vital account of history, but an example of William Faulkner’s maxim that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

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‘Descendant’

★★★1/2

Premiered Saturday, January 22, in the U.S. Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Monday, January 24, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, probably PG-13 for descriptions of slavery and racism. Running time: 108 minutes.