SYNOPSIS

Africa, 1810. Nighttime.
A slave ship leaves Senegal on the west coast of Africa headed, with its cargo of slaves, for the Americas.

This eighteen-week sea journey - an eternity of hell - condenses the centuries of cruelty during which countless European ships plied the transatlantic slave trade. The captives on the boat experience every calamity, the height and depths of desperation and heroism.

The narrator of this journey is an anonymous African in the ship's hold sharing the fate of his brothers and sisters of misfortune. Through his eyes we see a story that no one has yet been able to tell. He is caught up in the revolt, seized by hope, or plunged into the darkest despair. In the slow bedazzlement of the horror which demolished so many lives, lives which would struggle to be reborn, he will come to know - and never to forget - the Middle Passage.

BACKGROUND NOTES

Beginning in the 16th century, Europe instituted the transatlantic slave trade, for the great enrichment of some and with the benediction of the all of humanity. This trafficking in human beings continued for four centuries during which two hundred fifty million Africans died or were deported to the Americas.

The aim of this film is twofold: first of all, to bring life to this dark and terrible human experience in order to inform, to engrave in memories and consciences what was nothing less than an unprecedented genocide in human history. The second aim is to show that these slave ships - the theme of the film - are part of the cultural heritage of the peoples who were enslaved. For the word "heritage" has long been attached to monumental aspects, which in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas, only represent the colonial side of the story. To give value to entities such as slave ships, to study them, get to know them, keep them alive through our appropriation of them, means to give them existence in the eyes of a world which has never deigned to recognize the extent and the consequences - still felt today - of this transatlantic slave trade. Furthermore, it allows us, the descendants of slaves, to regard our own history not with shame (we were not the organizers of this system and of the raids that decimated Africa), but with pride: the pride of people who, out of chaos, were reborn, who became beings "in our own right", beings rich with history. In the face of the institutionalization of silence, looking at Slavery through the prism of the slave ship is a way for us to lay, in the garden of the countries which organized or were accomplices to this atrocity, the first stone of the first monument in memory of the 250,000,000 anonymous Africans that came before us.