The Georgetown 272
The Georgetown 272: The Journey, a locally produced and shot documentary that was recently accepted into the Toronto International Nollywood Film Festival, highlights a forgotten piece of New Orleans history.
It's a story of 272 enslaved people who were sold by the Jesuits to raise money for the construction of Georgetown University. Many of these people ended up in New Orleans. When producer Carl Van was considering working on the project with director Al Moten, he asked some friends if they had heard of the Georgetown 272. They said, "No."
"That's when I decided this story was important enough to be told because even my well-educated friends had not heard about it," Van said. "My main motivation for this film is to simply let people know what happened."
Working on the film was a one-and-a-half-year journey. Van said the initial response they received from Georgetown was all of the enslaved people had died, but they were surprised to find many of the 272 survived and had living descendants. Van said many of the survivors continued practicing their Catholic faith even after they made it to New Orleans.
Van has submitted the documentary to other film festivals, including the New Orleans Film Festival.
A
trailer for the film can be viewed on YouTube, and anyone interested in the
documentary can visit its Instagram page for more information on the progress
of the film.
