This is a film from Higher Ground Productions, the film company started by President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama. They've produced about a half-dozen films thus far. The first was a documentary called American Factory (2019), which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Their second documentary Crip Camp (2020) was nominated in that same category. Their third Becoming was up for an Emmy Award. It's likely this film will also be up for similar awards. Director Margaret Brown was herself nominated for an Emmy Award for her documentary The Great Invisible (2015). However, the film that put Brown on the map was The Order of Myths (2008), which was about Mobile, Alabama, a city along the Gulf Coast.
This film is also about Mobile, Alabama, yet a different side of it. While The Order of Myths focused on the tradition of Mardi Gras, this film focuses on a shameful piece of history and the ramifications of it. In 1808, the United States banned the import of slaves, which meant that no new slaves could be brought by boat into the country. For the most part, this stopped the international slave trade. Obviously, domestic slavery continued until the American Civil War ended it in 1865. Despite the ban though, some people still illegally traded slaves by boat. One of those people was Timothy Meaher who was an Irish landowner who lived in Mobile. Meaher had a boat, a schooner called the "Clotilda." Meaher sent Captain William Foster on that boat to West Africa to purchase some slaves.
The exact date is unknown but reportedly in the summer of 1860, the Clotilda returned with 110 slaves aboard and were delivered to Meaher in Mobile. Because this was illegal and the punishment for it was death, the Clotilda was burned and sunk somewhere off the coast of Alabama, in the Gulf of Mexico. One of the slaves onboard the Clotilda was a man named Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis who is considered the last survivor of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Once slavery ended in 1865, Lewis and the other slaves from the Clotilda founded a community in Mobile, known as "Africatown." This film is mainly about the residents of Africatown today. Many of whom identify as the descendants of the slaves onboard the Clotilda.
Since the emancipation of the Clotilda survivors, there have been several attempts to find the ship, scuttled somewhere under the water. Brown's documentary follows their descendants, starting in 2018 when the government, along with organizations like National Geographic, began searching for the Clotilda once again. It's not clear as to why this search began, but one reason could have been due to the publishing of the book Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston. That book is about Cudjoe Lewis. It's based on an interview Hurston did with Lewis back in 1927, less than a decade before he died. It took over 90 years for the book to be published, which put a lot of attention on the Clotilda and possibly prompted the search for it, nearly 160 years after it was destroyed and vital evidence was lost.
Descendant. Emmett Lewis in Descendant. Cr. Participant/Courtesy of Netflix © 2022
Brown's documentary though isn't about the search for the Clotilda. Yes, the search brings attention to Africatown and the history that has been lost or intentionally kept quiet, but the film is more about the residents and the people who still live there. In that, this film isn't just about recapitulating the past and the harm that was done. It's also about spotlighting the harm that's currently being done. While it might not be the sexiest of topics, this film dips into the issue of land zoning, which opens the door as to how Black people in Africatown are still being exploited and abused.
The film wrestles toward the end with the question of justice. The crime that was committed occurred 160 years ago and the person who did it has long been dead, so when it comes to justice, the question arises of what does justice look like now. It's an intriguing question. It becomes a question of what do the current generation do about the generation that has passed. Given this film was bought by President Obama's company, it arguably ends on what is probably the best example of why the Smithsonian Institute and its museum about African American history is so very important.
Rated PG for brief language and smoking.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 49 mins.
Available on Netflix.
