Review of “A Story of Bones”: Righting Saint Helena’s Colonial Wrongs

Directors Joseph Curran and Dominic Aubrey de Vere’s feature does something all too few documentaries dare to do these days: end on a downbeat, less-than-triumphant note. It’s not until it happens that you realize how much you’ve missed that bitter taste in the mouth while dining on the sugary banquet of the many happy endings currently de rigueur in Doc Land. How bracing to encounter a movie that’s not here just to make us feel good. That’s not to say there aren’t elements of this story that are inspiring, moving and very faintly hopeful—just not the last couple of minutes when onscreen text reveals the story’s final resolution.

The bones at the center of the story are those of 9,000 Africans who died and were buried on Saint Helena, the UK-territory island in the middle of the Atlantic best known for being where Napoleon was exiled and died. The absurd irony is that the grave where he was buried is now actually empty, his remains having been repatriated to France. But that doesn’t stop the island from keeping his empty tomb spotlessly clean, signposted, and a well-advertised tourist attraction.

In fact, as this decade-spanning story reveals, the British government’s plans to bring an airport to the island (hitherto only reachable by sea) is what led to the discovery of 325 skeletons on land earmarked for the development. The remains were those of Africans who were “liberated” from the slave trade by the 19th-century Brits, but like the other 8,000 bodies known to have been buried in a mass grave in the darkest corner of the island’s cemetery, these 325 were buried without due ceremony or respect. Namibian-born Annina van Neel, who is married to a Saint Helenan, was originally employed by the airport’s developer to be the project’s chief environmental officer, but she became determined to ensure that the 325 are buried in a way that memorializes the island’s colonial past and the suffering it caused.

Eventually, van Neel teams up with American historian and preservationist Peggy King Jorde, who has worked on similar memorial sites in the US. The two collaborate over the years to get the island authorities, the comparatively deep-pocketed British government, and anyone else who will listen, to help right this ancient wrong.

Curran, de Vere, and their editing team adroitly weave together the various strands of the story, which range across history, regional politics, post-colonial economics, and a growing international movement struggling to make people realize, in a real-politique way, that black lives matter. That might make it all sound worthy and dry, but this is in fact a moving, empathic story with extremely likable protagonists, marbled with dazzling landscape photography, showing just how beautiful, bleak, and weird the island is.

• A Story of Bones is in UK cinemas from 2 August.

Source: Cinephil