The Living Consequences

Variety, the entertainment industry daily, has a complimentary review this morning of Traces of the Trade.

The reviewer, John Anderson, describes Traces as a “courageous scab-ripper of a tale … raising very troubling questions about what it means to be black or white in America.”

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While we were in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, my cousin Tom DeWolf appeared on C-SPAN 2’s Book TV. The program, which ran an hour and 15 minutes, can currently be viewed online here.

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Tomorrow’s edition of the Christian Science Monitor includes a feature story about Traces of the Trade, entitled “Family confronts the North’s slave-trading past.”

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Since Sundance ended over the weekend, there have been two more prominent reviews of Traces of the Trade.

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In this post, I want to discuss, and link to, the various reviews of Traces of the Trade which have come out during the Sundance Film Festival. I intend to cover the good, the bad, and the ugly, and to offer a thought or two in response to the reviewers.

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This morning brings another outstanding and detailed article on Traces of the Trade at the Sundance Film Festival, this time in the Arizona Daily Star.

This article features Jim Perry, a Tucson resident and direct descendant of James D’Wolf who appears in Traces of the Trade. He’s also my father, so I’m particularly pleased at how well this story turned out.

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The Denver Post has an excellent article this morning on Traces of the Trade and Inheriting the Trade, featuring my distant cousins Keila and Holly, and our friend and colleague Harold Fields.

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I’ll refrain from posting too much about the flood of press coverage generated for Traces of the Trade by its acceptance for competition at Sundance.

By far the best coverage, from our perspective, was David Halbfinger’s New York Times article about the Sundance lineup. The story, which emphasized the trend towards films from an individual perspective (“political subjects dealt with in human terms”), led the Arts section that morning. Halbfinger mentioned Traces before any other film — and prominently ran one of our favorite photos, the cover shot on Tom’s book, as the first of three photos from the films.

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Paul Davis, a reporter for the Providence Journal, attended the screening of Traces of the Trade on Tuesday at the Providence Black Repertory Company.

This morning, he has an article in the Journal, headlined “Shaking the Family Tree: Filmmaker Explores Her Family’s Role in the Slave Trade,” and describing the film and its context in detail, as well as responses to it at the screening.

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