Ghosts of Amistad: Storytelling through Documentary Film

Distinguished Professor Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship, will present this powerful and haunting documentary. Ghosts of Amistad is based on Rediker's The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (Penguin, 2012).  The film chronicles a journey to Sierra Leone in 2013 to visit the home villages of the rebels who captured the slave schooner Amistad in 1839, to interview elders about local memory of the incident, and to search for the long-lost ruins of Lomboko, the slave trading factory where their cruel transatlantic voyage began.  The filmmakers rely on the knowledge of villagers, fishermen, and truck drivers to recover a lost history from below in the struggle against slavery.