January 17, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Springside alum’s film about her slave-trading family picked for Sundance Festival

This photo is from 2001, when Katrina received the Springside Outstanding Young Alumna award, which actually was for the project that just won the Sundance Film Festival. Since that time she has completed the filming, been to Africa several times, finished the research, etc.

Springside School alumna Katrina Browne’s documentary, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, has been selected as one of 16 documentaries to be shown at the Sundance Film Festival this year! Its world premiere will be on Monday, Jan. 21 (Martin Luther King Day), at the Festival. She worked on the film for nine years, during which  time she was honored by Springside as “Distinguished Young  Alumna.”  Katrina, who graduated from Springside in 1985, is working on arranging a Philadelphia screening of the film for the spring.

This personal documentary tells the story of first-time filmmaker  Katrina Browne’s Rhode Island ancestors, the largest slave-trading  family in U.S. history. At Browne’s invitation, nine fellow descendants agree to journey with her to retrace the steps of the Triangle Trade. They soon learn that slavery was business for more than just the DeWolfs (Katrina’s family); it was a cornerstone of Northern  commercial life.

The family travels from Bristol, Rhode Island, where the family “business” was based, to slave forts in Ghana, where they meet with African-Americans on their own  homecoming pilgrimages, to the ruins of a family-owned sugar plantation in Cuba. At each stop, the family grapples with the contemporary legacy of slavery, not only for black Americans, but also for themselves as white Americans.