![]() When says in the movie, “The boat’s just waiting to get raised up. And I feel like there’s this looping that happens, you know, with history and things. And I mean, she was sort of forgotten and then rediscovered the same way Africatown was. I really deeply felt her presence and I became obsessed with her. There was just something about, a hundred years ago, this woman wandering through the south. But then I started reading her letters as well, and just got a sense of her as a woman and a writer and I felt very deeply connected to her. ![]() It’s this double whammy of both her gifts as a writer and Cudjoe Lewis’ words, and his remembrances and his deep sadness of leaving his home and coming here, told in his own voice. “Descendant” Netflixīrown on the Influence of Zora Neale Hurston and Including Excerpts from “ Barracoon” So the whole time I was making the film, I was always very cognizant of how do I translate the experience of how I feel - the smells, the sounds, the sort of lushness of this place alongside this gray blight - into a movie? Because I come from a poetry background, but film is this visceral thing you can almost enter into, and I just felt like the world of Africatown was that visceral and I wanted to offer that up to the audience to know what the community was a part of, or what their life was like. Maybe they don’t see it until you show them. Like, why would anyone do that and think that’s okay? And for four-and-a-half years, I was, like, ‘How do you capture this? How do you show what this is?’ But then there’s also part of me that’s hopeful when people in power see this, they’ll see it. And just feeling like, how is this possible? It’s so disgusting. I remember driving down early days when we were just starting, in development, down the road to Lewis Quarters, which is surrounded by camphor and which is historically Gulf Lumber, which the mayor of Mobile, who’s featured in the film, his family historically that. It is clearly polluting, and it just seems so unjust to stand there. And when you first go there, it’s very emotional - or it was for our team. And then you zoom up, zoom out, and there’s a chemical industrial complex that surrounds it. There’s a community garden that’s the biggest community garden in the state of Alabama. ![]() I mean, there’s definitely blight there, but there’s also a lot of beauty.    Brown on Shooting in AfricatownĪfricatown is a very lush place that feels cared for and loved. To hear this and more conversations with your favorite TV and film creators, subscribe to the Toolkit podcast via Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, or Overcast. Listen to the entire discussion below or read on for excerpts from the conversation. On this episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Brown discusses the necessity of collaborating with her subjects to tell this story, identifying the central question of “Descendant,” the joy of including the work and words of Zora Neale Hurston, and much more. “Descendant” tells us what happened, but is much more about the experience of living with history and the radical act that storytelling can sometimes be, when it’s a story people in power would rather stay below the surface.Īnna Nicole to Pamela: Two Netflix Documentaries Try to Find New Context for the Blonde Bombshell as Cultural Icon But the film also works to meld the past and present through evocative readings of remembrances from Cudjoe Lewis, one of enslaved people taken to Mobile on the Clotilda’s voyage. Through rich and meditative cinematography and sound design as alive as the cicadas in the bushes, Brown and her team create a sense of the community the Clotilda descendants have built in Africatown. “Descendant” is a single tense title, but it follows the community of Africatown, which is part of the greater Mobile, Alabama area (although it certainly isn’t zoned like a suburb), and the many descendants of the Clotilda who still live there. It’s been there the entire time.” But the mystery of where the ship was sunk and the process of how it was found again aren’t nearly as interesting to Brown’s film as the tension of who will get to benefit from the slave ship Clotilda’s recovery. As documentary subject and writer of the film Kern Jackson puts it, “The boat’s waiting to get raised up. On its surface, Margaret Brown’s “Descendant” is about the rediscovery of the wreck of the last slave ship to (illegally) arrive in the United States in July of 1860, less than a year before the start of the American Civil War.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |