The Long Shadow is a mishmash of stuff about the history of slavery and race issues in America up until about 2018. The filmmaker’s ancestors owned slaves — and I was kind of hoping that this would be more of a memoir. Instead, it seemed like a set of about a dozen mini-documentaries about various topics having to do with race in America. For example — the film’s gruesome coverage of the 2003 Lockheed Martin shooting in Meridian Mississippi could have been the subject of its own documentary.
The film has a strange teaching quality as if the audience is completely ignorant of almost everything having to do with the oppression of blacks in America — which is something like the view of the filmmaker when she was growing up. The film has a lot of interesting footage and images, and obviously quite a bit of research and expense went into the making of the film. E for effort (?)
Another take on the film: http://www.passionriver.com/thelongshadow.html