The Middle Passage

Amistad showed that it's not enough to make an earnest film stating the obvious about slavery - that it's cruel, inhuman and totally wrong. But this far more modest movie actually does succeed in doing something new; using an anonymous narrator to evoke the experiences of Dahomey slaves on their terrible, most likely fatal boat trip across the Atlantic, the film is not only informative, it actually conveys something of the physical, spiritual and mental suffering involved. If the film is determinedly poetic and philosophical in both its images and narration, its artiness doesn't preclude truth, subtlety, imagination, even beauty.