Originally, S. Pearl Sharp’s award-winning film was supposed to be a quick, 30-minute movie about how one artist deals with the residuals of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

But after 10 and a half years of interviews, editing and traveling, ‘The Healing Passage/Voices From the Water’ became a 90-minute documentary with 12 artist interviews. The film raises questions about how slavery still influences the lives of black Americans and Africans, how artistry is the only way to understand the horrors and how even white Americans can grieve about their past and the role Africans played in the slave trade.

Sharp, who flew in from Los Angeles earlier this week, screened her film Thursday at the Community Folk Art Center for about a dozen viewers. She opened the night with an introduction and took questions afterward.

‘I know that artists have a responsibility to do vital and healing work,’ Sharp said. ‘Not just healing in the physical sense, because art heals your spirit. … Art transforms reality. It helps you.’

Sharp’s film has won the ‘Blockbuster Audience Favorite Award’ at the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival 2005, the award for excellence in documentary filmmaking from the 2005 Roxbury Film Festival and the best documentary award at the Denver Pan-African Film Festival in 2005, among others.

Numerous themes emerged, focusing early on how the black community uses art to understand American slavery. The opening line of the film is a quote from Toni Morrison: ‘The consequences of slavery, only artists can deal with. And it’s our job.’

‘That quote, the film sort of grew into it,’ Sharp said, ‘and I didn’t know it was happening.’

What makes Sharp’s film unique is that it addressed issues that many of its kind fail to. Near the end, she asks an interviewee in Africa, ‘Why do you want to come back to a place that showed as much cruelty as the U.S. did?’ It’s a question the film challenges its audience with, one that would have recently drawn critical eyes from peers.

‘That is a sign of how much we’ve grown,’ Sharp said. ‘Twenty-five years ago, we wouldn’t have had this discussion about our role in the slave trade. Now, we have these discussions about what was going on.’

Sharp also raises questions that are still contented, like what role modern-day white Americans can play in the grieving process. In the film, she interviews Katrina Browne, a filmmaker whose ancestors owned some of the most prominent plantation farms in Rhode Island.

‘I don’t want to put it on the same level,’ Browne says of her grieving process, ‘but there is some level of healing to be done for white people.’

Another artist, Riua Akinshegun, whose workshops were meant to be the focus of Sharp’s original, 30-minute film, asks all her workshop’s participants – white and black – whether they lost anyone in the Middle Passage. Part of her workshop consists of making voodoo-like dolls to materialize the pain, as well as dance and rituals to help the healing process.

Sharp met one professor on Gore Island who, when told about the film’s short consideration of white America’s grieving process, refused to speak with her anymore.

One Los Angeles film critic spoke with Sharp about that part exclusively for 20 minutes, then didn’t mention it at all in his review.

‘I asked my editor what that’s about,’ Sharp said. ‘She said, ‘I don’t think he can go there.’ I think that’s what that was about.’

‘Most of the reactions were positive. Nobody has really had any problem with it.’

Ultimately, Sharp’s film is about understanding the pain of the slave trade and coping with it in the modern day.

‘We as a people were spending too much time focusing on the pain and sorrow,’ Sharp said, ‘and not enough on the joy. If I started the film with that pain and sorrow, people would be turned off. So it focuses very much on the use of dance and singing and other things.’

Published on February 9, 2006 at 12:00 pm