There is no better movie on that period in history. It shows the African spirit not only as passive and accepting or merely as a vehicle to be brutalised by an antagonist who is given all the lines but here the Africans are allowed to be people. We see a real portrayal of people with feelings, emotions and lives.<br /><br />It touches on some of the aspects of mental slavery that other movies avoid, such as the biracial son of the master and a slave being indoctrinated with the church to hate his black mother and her spirituality. The scenes with him gazing longingly at white Madonna and child imagery in a church being attended to by a white priest telling about his wicked heathen mother really ring home.<br /><br />From start to finish this is definitely the black perspective on slavery. Amistad is nothing to this. Amistad was about a court case, did nothing to the actualities of slavery or the deeper issues as Sankofa did with panache and feeling.