Descendant

Slant Magazine by

With Descendant, filmmaker Margaret Brown finds poetry where most would see the opportunity for a polemic.

San Francisco Chronicle by G. Allen Johnson

Descendant isn’t just necessary. It’s urgent.

The Associated Press by Jake Coyle

There is a searching, ruminative dialogue running throughout the film. Brown and editors Michael Bloch and Geoffrey Richman beautifully weave together disparate voices into a meditative chorus.

Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele

With Descendant, Brown wisely chooses to be respectfully, poetically alert instead of imposing, as her use of archival footage shot by Hurston suggests: She’s adding to a pioneering Black filmmaker’s anthropological empathy, updating the conversation, witnessing the witnessers.