Higher Ground, the production company founded by Barack and Michelle Obama, has established an enviable track record with Oscar voters, earning a Best Documentary Feature nomination last year with Crip Camp, and a win in 2020 for American Factory.
It’s back in the Oscar race this year with Descendant, a Netflix documentary directed by Margaret Brown. The award-winning film centers on the descendants of the Clotilda, the last slave ship known to have entered the U.S., which sailed into Mobile Bay, Alabama on the eve of the Civil War. RELATED: The Contenders Documentary – Deadline’s Full Coverage “The Obamas’ and the Netflix platform is just crucial because… these kinds of histories are being obscured and obfuscated and denied,” Brown said during an appearance at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Documentary event. “And to have that kind of support is in defiance to those who would not like these stories to be told.” In part, the documentary explores efforts to locate the vestiges of the Clotilda, which was sunk immediately after discharging its human cargo on a stretch of the Mobile River, around 1860.
After a search of more than 150 years, the vessel was finally located alongside land owned by the Maeher family, descendants of the man who had bankrolled the illegal expedition to import slaves (the practice had been outlawed in 1808). “I never really thought when I was making the film that it was important that the ship be found,” said Brown, a native of Mobile. “But then when they did find the ship and everything that came after that, I was very glad they did because as Kamau [Sadiki, diver and slave shipwreck investigator] says in the movie, it’s this tangible piece of evidence.
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