In the documentary series, Wilbrink and Blickendall follow the Underground Railroad, an underground network that helped thousands of slaves escape to freedom. The journey takes you through Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Chicago, Detroit, and eventually ends in Canada.
During their trip they visited Angola Penitentiary, a massive prison in Louisiana. Slaves worked on this former cotton plantation in the 19th century, and prisoners today do similar work. Every year during the Angola Penitentiary Rodeo, black prisoners are thrown onto bulls as matadors.
In St. Louis, they meet a couple of ultra-conservative white lawyers who made news in 2020 by chasing Black Lives Matter protesters out of their front yard with automatic weapons. But they also see people getting reparations for the history of slavery, something they talk about all over the world but do nothing about. The reparations would come, among other things, from taxes on legal cannabis cultivation.
The two filmmakers, one black and one white, constantly confront their own colour and each other in the series. Their journey forces them to think with Dutch sobriety about who they are, where they stand, and how they relate to their environment. The series offers a mirror to the tensions and issues that also play out in Dutch society, from the Zwarte Piet debate to… racial profiling.
Underground tracks, weekly from Sunday 31 August, at 10:09 pm on Omroep ZWART on NPO2.
