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Descendant Movie Review

Descendant is a 2022 documentary film directed by Margaret Brown. It’s a chaotically edited and structured film that benefits from a powerful history lesson.

Descendants of the survivors from the Clotilda celebrate their heritage and take command of their legacy as the discovery of the remains of the last-known slave ship to arrive in the United States offers them a tangible link to their ancestors. This story is obviously very personal and not particularly universal, but it really works in the context of US history and in particular its problematic past with racism and slavery.

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This movie deals with so much story that it becomes overburdened with interviews, facts and people being interviewed. It was a lot. A more streamlined approach was sorely lacking here. The result is a mixed bag of interviews as some are quite deep and moving while the others are not really necessary to the main story at hand.

The highlight here is the glimpse that we get at the last living black man who came on this illegal ship all the way back in the 1860s. These moments were so illuminating and so powerful as you get a sense that you are glimpsing into the past yourself. They were so superb that they unfortunately rendered the rest of the movie only serviceable.

The interviews that we get to see range from the ancestors of these slaves to the people living in this city, including white people. That variety of interviewees gave the movie a lot of range, but again so many of them are not all that important and could have easily been cut from the final product.

Descendant is solidly edited and directed in the smoother sections, but problematic in its second half where the film began to lag. There is no need for a documentary to have a two-hour runtime. I always contend that they should be one and a half hours in length, and had this one done that, it would have been much more powerful.

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