Fourteen years ago, while working on another documentary about Mobile’s racially divided Mardi Gras, director Margaret Brown became acquainted with both a descendant of Timothy Meaher and a descendant of one of the Clotilda’s African captives. “​My hometown of Mobile, Alabama, is a city of closely guarded secrets,” Brown explains. “But what underpins all that storybook Mobilian lore is the darkest, most painful and indeed most American of secrets: the brutal reality of slavery.