The powerful trailer for Descendant makes clear that the story around the Clotilda has been dominated by the discovery of the remains of the ship, and the slave trader Timothy Meaher who smuggled Africans on board.

“The way my mother told me,” recalls one interviewee, “Timothy Meaher, a local businessman, made a bet that after slavery was abolished, that he could still bring Africans into the country. He went and brought them back here, and burned the ship to conceal the crime”.

The trailer suggests that this narrative will be rewritten in the documentary as it reckons with the legacy of the Clotilda and gives voice to the descendants of the Clotilda’s survivors.

“It’s slowly been erased, and as far as I can remember, it’s never been in history books,” one interviewee explains of the forgotten history of the ship and its enslaved passengers.

“I don’t want the momentum of the story to just be focused on the ship,” another resident of Africatown adds. “It’s not all about that ship.”

Netflix’s Descendant: the Obamas’ powerful new documentary tells the story of the last known slave ship to reach the US