Margaret Brown on the politics of storytelling in 'Descendant'

On the surface, Margaret Brown's "Descendant" is about the rediscovery of the wreckage of the last slave ship that arrived (illegally) in the United States in July 1860, less than a year before the Civil War began. . As Kern Jackson, subject of the documentary and screenwriter of the film, says, “The boat is waiting to rise. He's been there all the time. But the mystery of where the ship was sunk and the process by which it was found aren't as interesting to Brown's film as the tension of who will benefit from the recovery of the slave ship Clotilda.

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"Descendant" is a one-time title, but it follows the community of Africatown, which is part of the greater Mobile, Alabama area (although it's certainly not zoned as a suburb), and the many descendants of the Clotildas who still live there. Through rich, meditative cinematography and sound design as vivid as cicadas in the bushes, Brown and his team create a sense of community that Clotilda's descendants have built in Africatown. But the film also works to merge past and present through evocative readings of memories of Cudjoe Lewis, one of the slaves taken to Mobile on Clotilda's journey. "Descendant" tells us what happened, but is much more about the experience of living with the story and the radical act that the narration can sometimes be, whereas it is a story than the people in power prefer to stay below the surface.

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In this episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Brown discusses the need to collaborate with his subjects to tell this story, identifying the central question of "Descendant", the joy of including the work and words of Zora Neale Hurston, and many more.

Listen to the full discussion below or read on for excerpts from the conversation. To listen to these conversations and more with your favorite TV and movie creators, subscribe to the Toolkit podcast via , , , or .

Brown on set in Africatown

Africatown is a very lush place that feels cared for and loved. I mean, there's definitely some scourge there, but there's also a lot of beauty. There is a community garden which is the largest community garden in the state of Alabama. There are trees that bear fruit. There are flowers. And then you zoom in, zoom out, and there's a chemical industrial complex surrounding it. And when you go there for the first time, it's very emotional - or it was for our team. We felt very upset. It smells bad. It's strong. It's clearly polluting, and it seems so unfair to stay there. It makes you want to cry. We cried. I remember coming down [in the] early days when we were just starting out, in development, down the road to Lewis Quarters, which is surrounded by camphor and which is historically Gulf Lumber, that the mayor of Mobile, which is featured in the movie, his family historically [owns] this [business]. And just the feeling, how is that possible? It's so disgusting. Like, why would someone do this and think it's okay? And for four and a half years I was, like, 'How do you capture that? How do you show what it is? ' But there's also a part of me that hopes that when people in power see this, they will see it. Maybe they don't see it until you show them.

So throughout the time that I was making the film, I was always very aware of how I was translating the experience of what I feel - the smells, the sounds, the kind of lushness of this place next to this gray burn - in a movie? Because I come from a poetic background, but cinema is this visceral thing that you can almost walk into, and I just felt like the world of Africatown was so visceral and I wanted to offer that to the audience to know what the community was a part of or what their life was like.