A film built from the record.

What this film is

Three lives, held together across sixteen months and an ocean: an enslaved African man aboard the ship, an ordinary English sailor on the deck, and Olaudah Equiano, a formerly-enslaved African in London whose anonymous letter to the Morning Chronicle on 18 March 1783 first put the massacre into public view. Granville Sharp, the English abolitionist lawyer who carried the case into the Admiralty and the courts, enters as a supporting character.

The film's moral centre is the African protagonist. He is not a device for a European character's arc. His survival into Jamaica is not framed as freedom. His name is not preserved in the historical record; neither are the names of any of the people killed on the Zong. The absence of those names is itself a thematic hinge of the film.

What this film refuses to do

• ·It will not narrate the Zong as the cause of abolition. The Slave Trade Act (1807) and the Slavery Abolition Act (1833) came decades later. The case contributed to a mobilisation already underway; it did not end slavery.
• ·It will not frame the arrival in Jamaica as freedom. The people who survived were offloaded into chattel slavery.
• ·It will not treat the massacre as entertainment. Violence is held carefully — in sound, in aftermath, in refusal to linger — and attention to the dignity of the people being killed is a non-negotiable of every scene.
• ·It will not clone the face or voice of any identifiable real person without permission.

Dramatization statement

The African protagonist is a named composite. The ordinary sailor is a composite drawn from documented Liverpool slaver crews of the period. Olaudah Equiano and Granville Sharp are real historical persons, portrayed within the limits of what their own writings and papers support. Captain Luke Collingwood and First Mate James Kelsall are named historical persons, used only where the court record supports. Specific scenes, dialogue and relationships between characters are invented and are labelled as such in production records.

The anonymous authorship of the 18 March 1783 Morning Chronicle letter is historically contested. The film dramatizes a specific choice — that Equiano wrote the letter, called on Sharp the next day, and that Sharp then carried the campaign into the Admiralty — because every event in that version is in the record and together they form the strongest dramatic reading. The uncertainty is named rather than hidden.

Made with AI

The film is made with AI assistance across writing, image, animation and audio work. The pipeline is local-first where possible, documented, and gated by human review at every creative and historical decision. The production journal records how the film is being built, which models are used, and what the trade-offs are. AI is the invisible engine of the project, not its pitch.

How to find the film

There is no trailer yet. When the first scene is finished, it will appear here. The planned access model for the finished film is a $1 minimum, pay-what-you-can — with stream and download — and five percent of revenue to the Breakfast Club of Canada.

For questions, source corrections, or interest in collaborating: hello@gigamega.ca.