When a burial for slave trade victims is unearthed, a small island faces a reckoning

A small and exceptionally remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean, the British overseas territory of St Helena is famed for being the place of Napoleon Bonaparte’s last exile and death. However, as this short documentary from the UK directors Joseph Curran and Dominic Aubrey de Vere explores, near Napoleon‘s tomb are the unmarked final resting places of some 9,000 victims of the transatlantic slave trade whose stories have largely gone untold. A truncated version of the feature-length documentary A Story of Bones (2022), Buried details the conversations and controversies that followed when, amid the construction of a new airport on St Helena in 2008, the bodies and burial objects of 325 once-enslaved Africans were unearthed. In particular, it follows the complex and emotional work of the Namibian environmental officer turned activist Annina van Neel to ‘provide a peaceful and respectful final resting place’ for these remains. In doing so, the film raises vital questions of justice, reckoning and collective memory that ripple far beyond St Helena’s shores.