Descendant (2022, Margaret Brown) (Patreon)

61/100

Not long after the Clotilda is found, descendants of slaves transported upon it are shown a painting, introduced by one white guy as follows: "Jim worked very closely with our artists at National Geographic to create a wonderful illustration of that fateful voyage." "I wouldn't term it wonderful," Jim quickly says, and while the voilà! reveal—a hypothetical view of the ship that features a cutaway hull revealing slaves chained beneath decks—inspires a couple of people in the audience to applaud the artists' skill, the vast majority gaze upon it in grim silence. At its best, Descendant explores that conflicted response, as residents of Mobile, AL's Africatown (aka Plateau) express their yearning for physical evidence of the crime that brought their families to this place (Brown started shooting in 2018, before the wreck was located), even as they also acknowledge the pain that such a discovery would surely bring. Similarly, folks tend to be of two minds regarding potential monetization of the Clotilda: Sure, their community can use the cash that tourism will bring, but at what emotional cost? It's all quite thorny in ways that print couldn't convey nearly as well, which was decidedly not the case with Brown's mediocre Deepwater Horizon doc. She does err, I think, in spending so much time on racism that's at best tangentially related to the ship or the Middle Passage in general; zoning that surrounds Africatown with waste-spewing industries has its roots in who inherited which tracts of land, but it's not as if American corporations aren't perfectly happy to poison anyone if it'll boost their profits, as films from Erin Brockovich to Dark Waters (plus countless docs) have previously exposed. Same with a discussion of monuments to Confederate heroes, though that's briefer. Worthy topics, but they dilute focus here, and I was always glad to get back to e.g. a descendant of the ship's captain citing epistolary indications that his ancestor maybe wasn't such a terrible person, having apparently treated the slaves with relative kindness, and getting smacked down by a descendant of said slaves who's not gonna entertain any face-saving distinctions between good masters and bad masters. Or the elderly man who gets at some truth when he inadvertently says "respiration" instead of "reparations." Bonus points for never mentioning that Questlove is a Clotilda descendant despite his being one of the film's producers. "I've been in enough documentaries," he surely recognized. (Also unaddressed, though a currently interesting not-very-fun fact: Those Africans were abducted from Benin by the same warrior unit that The Woman King is about, though the film is set four decades earlier and I gather declines to emphasize that practice.)

DEPT OF WTF?: About 80 minutes into Descendant, following one of the interludes in which residents read aloud from Zola Neale Hurston's Barracoon, Brown for some reason leaves in the sound of her own (I assume) footsteps, as well as the frame suddenly going askew as she (I assume) moves the camera. It's the only such moment in the entire film and I have zero idea what it's doing there. But it had to have been included for a reason. If anyone has any theories about what that reason might be, I'm immensely curious to hear them.