Descendent, Margaret Brown’s documentary about the search for America’s last known slave ship, begins with a distant figure kayaking through a sun-dappled swamp. Green leaves blanket the water’s surface and the rower’s strokes are slow and meditative. Nothing to see here, just a man – a Black man, we gather, as he glides closer – in nature, accompanied by the buzz of insects and the lone egret that is keeping watch. It’s a strikingly bucolic beginning for a work about so devastating a subject. We’re in for something different here, is the film’s opening gambit. It’s an unspoken promise that Descendent lives up to.
Brown, a white native of Mobile, Alabama, returned to her hometown to record the search for the Clotilda, believed to be the last slave ship in American history. Produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground production company along with Questlove (a descendant of enslaved people on the Clotilda), the film is a layered and slyly defiant portrayal of a community saddled with a shared history of unspeakable tragedy and violence. The treasure in this story is not a sunk vessel, as the interviews with its more literal-minded subjects might suggest, but a sense of justice and equilibrium that has been denied to a people that have been passing down their trauma from one generation to the next.
