I've never heard of this - I've got no real expectations, but it doesn't exactly sound like a giggle.
It tells the story of the Clotilda/Clotilde (the spelling seems uncertain), a slave ship organised for a bet by a white landowner after slavery had been abolished. This brought 110 Africans to Alabama - and was then burned and sunk leaving no evidence it ever existed, except for a load of people who'd been threatened with lynching if they ever spoke about it. But they told their children, and their children's children, and - well, you get the idea! And now their 6x great-grandchildren are telling us their stories.
Unfortunately, because the ship was burned and sank, there's absolutely no physical evidence that any of this happened - so part of the film focusses on efforts to find the wreck, but when you look at a map of the Mobile river you can't help but feel their chances are somewhat limited (no spoilers as to whether they found it though!). And they also interview quite a few people that have no interest in finding it - as one lady puts it "how do I put this? I just don't care". But might she change her mind?
The film also considers other elements of the history of the community - it makes an interesting point that a lot of the surrounding land is used for heavy industry which has resulted in various health issues - and the land is owned by the descendants of the landowner that originally brought the slaves over, so history (once again) shows its nasty habit of repeating itself. And then talk turns to reparations...
What are reparations supposed to provide? Justice? Punishment? Closure? Whilst crimes can't be inherited by descendant, assets and hardship certainly can, so what value should be placed on them? If reparations are made, who do they go to? And given that the landowner's descendants have absolutely no interest in engaging in any dialogue, how could they even be possible?
The film certainly poses some interesting questions although it probably won't surprise you hear that it doesn't answer them - that's probably asking a bit too much from a 109 minute Netflix documentary. The film does manage to end on a positive note though - various people have hope for the future, whatever it might hold.
However, I also have to report that the interesting questions don't fill up a huge amount of those 109 minutes either - it's all very worthy, but unfortunately it's not exactly thrilling. It's most a lot of people just talking about stuff that means something to them but not a lot to anyone else or reading from a book. There's also a lot of repeated use of the same historical footage - it feels unfortunately like filler.
I feel a bit mean being nasty about what it obviously an important film for a lot of people - I know it never hurts for me to be educated in this stuff, but I'm afraid that just didn't really do it for me. It's diverting in places with some nice countryside (balanced by some very ugly urban scenes), but it's no more than that, I'm afraid. If, after that glowing recommendation, you still fancy watching it then it's on Netflix but there's much more interesting stuff on there.
