Newport International Film Festival 2008

This personal documentary tells the story of first-time filmmaker Katrina Browne's New England ancestors, the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. At Browne’s urging, nine fellow descendants of her prominent family agree to journey with her to retrace the steps of the Triangle Trade. The group begins their trip from Bristol, Rhode Island, and travel to a slave fort of Ghana then to the sugar plantation in Cuba. At each stop the family grapples with the contemporary legacy of slavery, not only for black Americans, but for themselves as white Americans. The issues the DeWolf descendants are confronted with dramatize questions that apply to the nation as a whole: What are the legacies of slavery? Who owes who what for the sins of the fathers of this country? What history do we inherit as individuals and as citizens? What would repair—spiritual and material—really look like and what would it take?