The visuals and emotions from Alvin Ross’ Kunte Kinteh Island documentary, which details the legacy of arguably history’s most famous slave ever, exploded off the screen and enveloped the Woodruff Art Center that full of celebrities and dignitaries, including Tyler Perry, Soledad O’Brien, Kandi Burruss and others.
Kunte Kinteh Island: Coming Home Without Shackles was produced by Elvin Ross’ Studios, which brilliantly enlisted the services of legendary actor Ben Vereen, who played Chicken George in Alex Haley’s epic “Roots,” once the highest-rated miniseries of all time. The docu-drama transported the moviegoers back to the West African nation of Gambia and visits the descendants of Kunte Kinteh, who was part of the Mandinka Tribe, when Europeans trapped them, imprisoned them and transported them on a harrowing, horrific trip to the New World to be slaves to white aristocracy.
Moreover, The documentary traces the life of Kinteh and his lasting family legacy through profiles of his relatives in the village of Juffereh, Gambia in West Africa. For the first time, many African Americans and others got an up-close and powerful peek into the place where their ancestors were stolen several hundred years ago that began the African Holocaust. Kunte Kinte Island also explored what was called James Island, the place where Kunte Kinte and millions of his people were held in captivity just off the Gambian coast, to be broken down mentally, physically and spiritually before the long and torturous journey to Western civilization. The island was officially renamed “Kunte Kinte Island” in a special ceremony in 2011
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article courtesy of RollingOut.com
