Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Ridley Scott’s outlandish biopic Napoleon closed on Saint Helena, a 10-mile volcanic outcrop in the mid-Atlantic. Two centuries after the emperor’s death, his final exile is still what the island is best known for. But the powerful documentary A Story of Bones by Joseph Curran and Dominic Aubrey de Vere tells a different tale of what is still now a British Overseas Territory — though one no less bound up with history.The starting point is 2012, the initial focus the long-awaited airport that will at last end the island’s reliance on the Royal Mail Ship (a six-day voyage from Cape Town). But the future is seldom free of the past. Construction work uncovers the skeletal remains of 325 enslaved African men, women and children who were buried on the island in the 19th century before being disinterred to make way for an access road.The fate of those remains becomes an absorbing story in itself, as well as being a microcosm of the painful wider debate about the unresolved legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. At the heart of the story is Annina van Neel, who relocates from Namibia to help oversee the airport project and finds that local authorities have left the bones in boxes in an old prison. The film follows her efforts to make sure they receive a proper reburial.The result is filled with sad ironies. The airport was funded by the UK to kick-start tourism — expected to be driven by Napoleon’s tomb, which has lain empty since 1840 but is kept pristine as a landmark. Elsewhere on the island, meanwhile, are human remains with no resting place — and not even names for history to remember them.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from August 2
