Durham Dispatch. 1.

Greetings from Realitywood, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, where one of the lead stories this year is, of course, Katrina. The festival acknowledges its Durham, NC, location through its Southern sidebar programming every year, so it came as no surprise that organizers moved quickly to invite docs that deal with the hurricane and its aftermath.

Only seven months after the storm, it may simply be too soon to expect traditional narrative arcs in stories about people who are still living without electricity, their homes still covered with mud and mold. The first feature, New Orleans Music in Exile, tracks the musicians, including luminaries Kermit Ruffins, Irma Thomas, Eddie Bo, Cyril Neville and Dr John, who have scattered to Austin, Houston, and elsewhere since the storm.

The filmmakers hit their Nola music marks, including everyone from Bill Taylor of the Tipitina's Foundation to general manager David Freeman of community radio station WWOZ and even Big Chief Monk Boudreaux in his Mardi Gras Indian finery. The movie tries too hard to appeal to catholic tastes by featuring everyone from the Subdudes to Cowboy Mouth. As it stands, some of the performances could be cut to tighten up the film, which feels overlong. Even so, the music has incredible power. Midway through footage of Marcia Ball's performing Randy Newman's "Louisiana" at the Grant Street Dancehall, the man seated next to me began to weep silently.

This morning's program, two shorts and a feature, went beyond the music. Still Standing examines the wreckage of filmmaker Paola Mendoza's Colombian grandmother's home in Waveland, Mississippi, and the difficulties non-English speakers and the elderly face navigating the insurance claim morass as they try to rebuild. After Katrina: Rebuilding St. Bernard's Parish shows an entire working-class community in extremis. Still living in a FEMA tent city in December, the citizens vow to rebuild, but the EPA still can't answer their questions about the effects of the one-million-gallon oil leak at nearby Murphy Oil, which mixed with the water that flooded their homes. As one frustrated but hopeful community organizer explains, New Orleans is about more than the Super Bowl and the French Quarter: "We're Americans. We're part of America..."

Desert Bayou makes it clear that even disaster can't change that fact, for good or ill. The feature follows the diaspora of 582 primarily African-American evacuees who boarded a JetBlue flight, destination unknown, only to be informed mid-flight they were headed to Salt Lake City, Utah: "And that's when everybody fell out." There are some great moments, but the filmmakers have about three stories here. Is it about racism in America? The footage of radio rabbi Shmuley Boteach, dropped from Salt Lake stations after he tried to question why evacuees were segregated on a National Guard base outside town, suggests it is. Is it about Curtis and Clifford and their families, who work with the Red Cross and try to make a go of settling in their new state, despite its distance from good gumbo? Or is it about the effect of these men's past crack and past convictions on their future chances in their new home, which only surfaces in the third act? There's a hell of a movie to be found in the editing room.

As Cyril Neville observes in Music in Exile, New Orleans is not the Deep South, it's the northernmost point in the Caribbean. At the midpoint of the Katrina program, the results resemble, appropriately enough, something of a jambalaya, but the roux of circumstance might not be enough to bring all these tastes together. More to come.

Posted by dwhudson at April 8, 2006 4:35 AM