Descendant review – fascinating documentary about a lost slave ship

For more than a century, the burnt wreck of the Clotilda, the last known ship to have transported enslaved Africans to America, lay somewhere in the straits near Mobile, Alabama. But it was through the oral histories of the descendants of those freed slaves, rather than the history books, that the legend persisted. Margaret Brown’s fascinating film deals not only with the rediscovery of the ship by a team of marine archaeologists, but also with its impact on a community that has rallied together and has finally managed to establish a key element of their collective history. And while the past has a tendency to be claimed and reshaped by those in power, the residents of Africatown, Alabama, are not about to let that happen again.