Rarely have past and present mingled in a documentary the way they do in “Descendant,” a nonfiction account of the last known ship to bring African captives to the American South for enslavement.
Margaret Brown's “Descendant," which recently premiered at the virtual Sundance Film Festival, chronicles the discovery of the ship, a 90-foot-long wooden schooner that was secretly burned and sunk near Mobile Alabama after it was used to illegally take and enslave 100 Africans on a trip across the Atlantic in the mid-19th century, decades after the international slave trade had been outlawed.
