‘Decscendant’ Trailer: Sundance Award-Winning Doc From Obamas’ Higher Ground Examines Descendants Of Last Slave Ship To Reach U.S.

EXCLUSIVE: Netflix has released a trailer for the award-winning documentary Descendant, a day before the Margaret Brown film screens as part of the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival.

The documentary, from Higher Ground – the production company of Barack and Michelle Obama – Participant, and Night Tide in association with Two One Five Entertainment, premieres on the streaming platform on October 21. It tells the story of the descendants of the last slave ship known to have reached the United States – the Clotilda – which surreptitiously docked in Mobile Bay in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. The ship was scuttled to hide evidence of the illegal transport of slaves (the trans-Atlantic slave trade had been formally outlawed by Congress in 1807).

“Freed in 1865, yet unable to return to their homeland, the survivors [of the Clotilda] founded Africatown — a testament to their strength which persists today despite the town’s governmental neglect and economic disparity,” the New York Film Festival program notes. “This long submerged history symbolizes a nation’s forgotten atrocities in this poignant and cathartic documentary from nonfiction veteran Margaret Brown (The Order of Myths). Reckoning with the legacy of this history and giving voice to the descendants of these enslaved people, Brown’s intricately drawn film tells an urgent tale of community revitalization, environmental action, and racial justice.”

Descendant documents the long effort to locate and raise the wreck of the Clotilda. Just as importantly, if not more so, the film shows how residents of Africatown have faced economic and other forms of racism for over a hundred years. Their neighborhood is hemmed in by heavy industry, reducing the value of the land and potentially exposing local people to dangerous chemicals.

“What person want to wake up knowing that they sitting on historic land,” one interviewee says in the trailer, “but they gotta smell the chemicals from a factory.”

According to the City of Mobile’s website, mayor Sandy Stimpson “has a bold mission for Mobile’s citizens to become One Mobile – a safer, more business and family friendly city.” But the film raises the question of whether African Americans in the town will continue to be disenfranchised and will not benefit from the possible economic boon that could come from marketing the Clotilda as a tourist attraction.

Descendant premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last January, where it won a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision. It also won Best Documentary Feature at the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, Ala., and played at SXSW, the Camden International Film Festival and the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, among other festivals.

The film is directed by Margaret Brown, herself a Mobile native; the producers are Brown, Kyle Martin, and Essie Chambers. Executive producers include Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Tarik “Black Thought” Trotter, Shawn Gee, Zarah Zohlman, and Kate Hurwitz.

Watch the trailer and view this article at Deadline.