The Living Consequences

Tomorrow, the Boston Globe offers a review of Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, entitled “Facing up to a family’s past as slave traders.”

The review is occasioned by the screening of the film tomorrow night at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. The film will be screened at 8:00pm, and afterward, Katrina Browne and I will participate in a question-and-answer period, along with editor Alla Kovgan and co-producer Elizabeth Delude-Dix.

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Traces of the Trade has been named the best documentary in the “Courage in Filmmaking” category for 2008 by the Women Film Critics Circle.

Gender played a central role in our discussions of race and privilege during the filming of Traces of the Trade, even though this issue did not appear in the finished film. So I think that this award, by an organization promoting the voices and perspectives of women in film, is a particularly fitting tribute to the work that Katrina Browne and everyone involved with the film has done.

The awards ceremony will be broadcast live on Wednesday, December 31 at 11am on WBAI-AM (New York) and streamed online at wbai.org.

This fall, the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities will sponsor a series of screenings of Traces of the Trade around the state.

The discussion series, “Traces of the Trade: Massachusetts and the Economy of Slavery,” commemorates the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade. Each event will feature a screening of the new, 55-minute discussion version of the documentary, along with historical materials and discussion of the film’s themes as well as the significance of slavery to the Massachusetts economy and to our society today. The series is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The screenings will take place as follows:

• Sat., Oct. 4, 2008 – Sheffield Historical Society, Sheffield, Mass.
• Tues., Oct. 7, 2008 – Old South Meeting House, Boston, Mass.
• Sat., Oct. 18, 2008 – Alternatives Unlimited, Inc., Whitinsville, Mass.
• Sat., Nov. 8, 2008 – The House of the Seven Gables, Salem, Mass.
• Thurs., Feb. 12, 2009 – New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Mass.

Traces of the Trade has won the New England Emerging Filmmaker award in the documentary category at the 17th annual Woods Hole Film Festival.

The Early Show on CBS is scheduled to air a live interview in New York with Tom DeWolf, Katrina Browne, and Juanita Brown on Monday, July 14.

The interview is to be conducted by anchor Harry Smith, who wrote about the film when it first aired on PBS:

… the journey is painful, tearful and revealing. … the film displays the difficult road toward reconciliation. See it or get it or pick up the book by Katrina’s cousin Tom DeWolf.

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On the front page of today’s Style section, the Washington Post runs a feature story on Traces of the Trade, headlined “A Family Discovers Its History of Shackles and Shame.”

The article, by Ellen Maguire, runs in advance of the Washington-area broadcast of the film on Sunday on WETA, and features interviews with Katrina Browne, the director, and Juanita Brown, a co-producer.

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The national broadcast premiere of Traces of the Trade on PBS begins this evening at 10:00pm.

Local PBS stations will carry the broadcast on different days and times, so be sure to check your local listings (opens in a new window).

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I’ve delayed posting about this morning’s press coverage of Traces of the Trade, as we prepare for the start of national broadcast this evening on PBS.

However, several members of the Traces family have asked me for the latest update, so I hope everyone else will bear with me—or simply move along—as I review what the press is saying about the documentary this morning.

I’ll start with an article in this morning’s Boston Globe by Vanessa Jones, about the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade. Vanessa and I had spoken a couple of weeks ago, about the reasons for the nation’s lack of awareness about the bicentennial, and she has done an excellent job of reporting on those who have been involved in commemorating the occasion, as well as interviewing scholars who can address the reasons for this historical amnesia.

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The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an article this evening, “A Family Confronts Its Slave-Trading Past,” featuring an interview with my cousin, Elly Hale.

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Laura Flanders, who hosts “RadioNation” on Air America Radio, has a video interview with Katrina Browne, the producer/director of Traces of the Trade, at Fire Dog Lake this afternoon.

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