IndieWire: “Participant Knows How to Find the Activism Audience”

April 5, 2023 – CEO David Linde sat down with IndieWire to discuss our impact campaigns, award-winning movies, and highlight the incredible story in Descendant. Communications director Rosalina Jowers digs into the work of the campaign with the help of documentary subject Veda Tunstall.

Participant Knows How to Find the Activism Audience

Veda Tunstall remembers the first time film people started poking around her hometown asking questions, and it wasn’t for the documentary that became “Descendant.”

Tunstall, a subject in Margaret Brown’s movie about the search for a long-lost slave ship near a community called Africatown, says that years before Brown showed up, other filmmakers wanted to make their own movies about hunting for the Clotilda. That didn’t go well. The community’s needs were never in mind and the story being told wasn’t their own; it was the ship’s.

The investment of time and attention that Brown and production company Participant put into “Descendant” felt different. The film also follows actual descendants who live in Africatown and examines how their ancestors’ actions can be traced across generations. The search for the slave ship was only half the story.

Read the full story here.