Directors Joseph Curran and Dominic Aubrey de Vere’s feature does something all too few documentaries dare to these days: end on a downbeat, less-than-triumphant note. It’s not until it happens that you realise how much you’ve missed that bitter taste in the mouth while dining on the sugary banquet of the many happy endings currently de rigueur in Doc Land. How bracing to encounter a movie that’s not here to just make us feel good. That’s not to say there aren’t elements of this story that are inspiring, moving and very faintly hopeful – just not the last couple of minutes when onscreen text reveals the story’s final resolution.
The bones at the centre of the story are those of 9,000 Africans who died and were buried on Saint Helena, the UK-territory island in the middle of the Atlantic that is best known for being where Napoleon was exiled and died. The absurd irony is that the grave where he was buried is now actually empty, his remains having been repatriated to France. But that doesn’t stop the island keeping his empty tomb spotlessly clean, signposted and a well-advertised tourist attraction.
