The Language You Cry In (1999)

1999. 53 minutes. Sierra Leone. Producer/Directors: Alvaro Toepke and Angel Serrano. Documentary

The film tells an amazing scholarly detective story reaching across hundreds of years and thousands of miles from 18th century Sierra Leone to the Gullah people of present-day Georgia. It recounts the even more remarkable saga of how African Americans retained links with their African past through a song, a burial hymn of the Mende people brought by slaves to the rice plantations of the Southeast coast more than two hundred years ago. In English and Mende with English subtitles.