A Story of Bones review – the battle to right Saint Helena’s colonial wrongs

Directors Joseph Curran and Dominic Aubrey de Vere’s feature does something all too few documentaries dare to these days: end on a downbeat, less-than-triumphant note. It’s not until it happens that you realise how much you’ve missed that bitter taste in the mouth while dining on the sugary banquet of the many happy endings currently de rigueur in Doc Land. How bracing to encounter a movie that’s not here to just make us feel good. That’s not to say there aren’t elements of this story that are inspiring, moving and very faintly hopeful – just not the last couple of minutes when onscreen text reveals the story’s final resolution.

The bones at the centre of the story are those of 9,000 Africans who died and were buried on Saint Helena, the UK-territory island in the middle of the Atlantic that is best known for being where Napoleon was exiled and died. The absurd irony is that the grave where he was buried is now actually empty, his remains having been repatriated to France. But that doesn’t stop the island keeping his empty tomb spotlessly clean, signposted and a well-advertised tourist attraction.

Related: Scraping away generations of forgetting: my fight to honour the Africans buried on St Helena

In fact, as this decade-spanning story reveals, the British government’s plans to bring an airport to the island (hitherto only reachable by sea) is what led to the discovery of 325 skeletons on land earmarked for the development. The remains were those of Africans who were “liberated” from the slave trade by the 19th-century Brits, but like the other 8,000 bodies known to have been buried in a mass grave in darkest corner of the island’s cemetery, these 325 were buried without due ceremony or respect. Namibian-born Annina van Neel, who is married to a Saint Helenan, was originally employed by the airport’s developer to be the project’s chief environmental officer, but she became determined to ensure that the 325 are buried in a way that memorialises the island’s colonial past and the suffering that caused. Eventually van Neel teams up with American historian and preservationist Peggy King Jorde who has worked on similar memorial sites in the US, and the two collaborate over years to get the island authorities, the comparatively deep-pocketed British government, and anyone else who will listen, to help right this ancient wrong.

Curran and de Vere and their editing team adroitly weave together the various strands of the story, which range across history, regional politics, post-colonial economics and a growing international movement struggling to make people realise, in a real-politique way, that black lives matter. That might make it all sound worthy and dry, but this is in fact a moving, empathic story with extremely likable protagonists, marbled with dazzling landscape photography, showing just how beautiful, bleak and weird the island is.

• A Story of Bones is in UK cinemas from 2 August.