Sundance 2022: Descendant Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Sundance Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

The American slave trade lead to over forty thousand trips to foreign soil using over twelve thousand vessels, each with its own unique story. But none are as fascinating as the Cothilda, the last known ship to have brought enslaved people to America with the most important detail being that it did so 40 years after slavery was abolished.

Up until this documentary, no physical evidence existed. Instead, it was a story passed down from the descendants of those that were brought over from the ship and forced to call Africatown, AL, or Plateau as it’s known today, their home. Further supporting these stories was one in particular from the last living survivor of the Cothilda, Cudjo Lewis, whose entire ordeal was documented in the book Barracoon. And still, the descendant’s stories stayed among themselves for fear of too much attention or persecution.

Descendant is a documentary that seeks to cut through these generations of silence by searching for evidence of the ship, a task that is successful and offers a path of hope and increased awareness for this blight on America’s history. And yet, the film’s true purpose is not focused on the merit of the ship becoming visible to the public, but more importantly, towards multi-generational families who have carried their ancestor’s journey with them since birth despite occupying a town that has deemed it necessary to turn a blind eye from its inception.

Descendant wrestles with the notion of forgiveness versus forgetting the past as the goal of healing centuries-old wounds steps to the forefront. But to forget is to commit a disservice to what the family’s ancestors endured after becoming displaced and commodified. The documentary continues to press those involved after the discovery of the Cothilda in how they plan to use their newly found validation to shine a light on the larger injustice incurred, however, it becomes a more interesting endeavor when the descendants who caused this atrocity attempt to remove themselves from the equation entirely.

In the end, Descendant is a highly sobering examination at just truly how far people are willing to go to own the truth, but it also portrays the beauty of kinship placing importance on how the love and preservation of family can bear all burdens.

*still courtesy of Sundance

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