Marian Trygve Freed Early Career Professor / Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies / Writer and filmmaker
My series of experimental documentaries aims to compensate for the absence of the remains connected to transatlantic slavery and to offer to the audience a new type of memorial traces. By tracing the voices of the invisible enslaved, I substitute the traditional geographic and historic maps of slavery with an emotional, perhaps more sensitive map, and replace the dead colonial archives by living archives, in which the leftovers are the heroes. Based on true events and involving individuals who lived in unbearable conditions and died unknown, every episode is to be considered as a site of memory. I call them “tales” because I strongly believe in the emancipatory and transformative power of storytelling, and because I think that history needs to be told in order to be taught. Named The Last Slave Ship, the episode 2 will be shot in Ouidah, Benin. Learn more abour Dr. Kanor.