Something to watch tonight: Friday 22 November
Descendant (Brown, 2022)
We watched an extraordinary documentary on Netflix the other night called Daughters: a group of incarcerated men prepare for a special “Daddy Daughter Dance” and the rare opportunity to spend quality time with – and even touch – their daughters (since 2014 many American prisons don’t allow in-person visits and even charge the prisoners for the virtual visits that are approved).
I haven’t quite worked out what my approach to it should be – a chat with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights tonight will help – so I’m going to park it for a while but re-up another documentary about the black American experience from earlier in this newsletter’s lifespan.
Descendant is about the last slave ship to arrive in America and the communities of people who can trace themselves back to it:
With no way to return home, they negotiated the purchase of a small amount of land from the Meahers and attempted to start lives as free people. The community became known as Africatown, and it still exists, surrounded on all sides by land still owned by the Meaher family (their company is known as Chippewa Lakes which gives you an idea about how they felt about the original occupants of the land as well as these new ones) and corrupted by toxic heavy industries that made the people sick.
The lives of these two communities – Africatown and the Meahers – are thus still entwined many generations later and the title of Margaret Brown’s superb documentary (Descendant) relates to both: enslaved people and their former owners.
Usually, any post over 30-days old goes behind the paywall but I’ve made this one free again (!) so you can read the whole thing. And you should watch the film if you can.
Where to watch Descendant
Worldwide: Streaming on Netflix