Mobile Native’s Africatown Film Accepted By Sundance

Emmett Lewis appears in Untitlted Clotilda Doc by Margaret Brown, an official selection of the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Descendant, an Africatown film by Mobile native and director Margaret Brown, has been accepted by the Sundance Film Festival, AL.com reported. Brown has previously created films on Texas songwriter Townes Van Zandt, the segregation of Mobile’s Mardi Gras celebrations and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. She has been involved with a years-long project about the discovery of the slave ship Clotilda and the Africatown community. Mary Elliott, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, praised the team behind the film and extended special congratulations to Kern Jackson, a professor at the University of South Alabama who is credited as co-writer and co-producer. The 2022 Sundance Film Festival opens January 20 in Park City, Utah.