The Documented South
6 Gulf South-produced and -focused documentaries in production or on the festival circuit this year
From biographing the life and shocking death of a gay New Orleans gospel singer, to marking the history of a Baton Rouge high school that elevated its athletics programs with inclusivity, to chronicling the urgency of preserving Cajun music in today’s age—documentary filmmakers in Louisiana and Mississippi have been busy this year, and they have something to show for it at the slate of local film festivals coming up over the course of the next several months. Here are half a dozen of the documentaries either currently in production or on the festival circuit that we’re most excited about—for their own artistry as films, as well as for their importance in the realm of Southern storytelling.
Roots of Fire
The film opens with the three women musicians in a forest clearing surrounded by tall trees, acoustically performing their French ballad, “Les anneaux de Marianson”. Then, Cajun musician Jourdan Thibodeaux delivers Roots of Fire’s opening lines, excerpted from a speech he delivered to an audience at Festivals Acadiens et Creoles:
“I’m gonna get real damn serious, and I want y’all to pay attention to me. I’m gonna say this section in English ‘cause I want to make sure that everybody understands me. If there’s somethin’ I hear a lot—and quite often—that pisses me off, it breaks my heart, it does a million emotions at one time—is that ‘it’s a shame, this culture’s dyin’. It’s a shame that the language is dyin’.’ Let me be the one to say: languages don’t die. Cultures don’t die. They’re killed by choice. Every single day, every one of you, every one of us, has a choice: that you’re gonna get up, and you’re gonna preserve the way that your daddy, and your grandma, and your great grandparents, and everybody that made you. That made you. The fact that if you’re not living your culture, you are killing your culture—and there’s no in-between. There is no middle ground.”
Once Thibodeaux (passionately, borderline aggressively) sets up Roots of Fire’s call to action, the rest of the documentary illustriously shows us what is at stake. The filmmakers follow five contemporary Cajun musicians of a younger generation—whose creative output and public message extends beyond composing and playing Cajun music to preservation and promotion of the culture, pushing the music and language into the future. Besides Thibodeaux (of Jourdan Thibodeaux et les Rôdailleurs), Roots of Fire features Kristi Guillory (of Bonsoir, Catin) Joel Savoy (founder of Valcour Records and Studio SavoyFaire, who plays in the Savoy Family Band, among other projects), Wilson Savoy (front man of the Pine Leaf Boys, who also plays in the Savoy Family Band, and others), and Kelli Jones (who plays with the band Feufollet, among others).
[Read about Marc Savoy's memoir, and Ann Savoy's book on the history of Cajun music, in our previous issues.]
Besides following these musicians along their personal journeys and exemplifying their roles in Acadiana’s tightly-knit music community, the film also weaves in important and often neglected or misinterpreted Cajun music history. Wilson Savoy, for example, takes care to emphasize that Cajun music is not “strictly a white creation”—crediting the African American accordion player Amédé Ardoin as the first person to record almost every Cajun standard still played today. Thirty years later Ira “Iry” LeJeune, a white musician, recorded the same songs with different titles and earned that original attribution. “But thirty years before that, Amédé recorded them all. Exact same songs, had different titles for them. So actually, the roots of what we consider Cajun music, as far as accordion style of Cajun music, were recorded by Amédé Ardoin, a Black man, in the 1920s.”
Producers and directors Jeremey Lavoi and Abby Berendt Lavoi were inspired to take on the project in part by homesickness for Louisiana. Jeremey grew up in Lake Charles, and the couple was visiting Abby’s family in Colorado when they stumbled upon the Louisiana Music Issue of the Oxford American in a bookstore in 2013. It came with a CD, which included a Chris Stafford’s rock-n-roll-ified version of “Parlez Nous á Boire”. “And I’d never at that time heard Cajun music played in that way before,” said Jeremey—who had grown up around the previous generation’s penchant for Zydeco and more traditional Louisiana music. But this kind of modern interpretation was new for both him and his wife/creative partner. “So, we just kind of like got fascinated with this song. And then kind of took this YouTube rabbit hole, listening to all these younger Cajun bands at the time,” Jeremey said. “And we’re just watching these YouTube videos, listening to this music … seeing these dance clubs in Lafayette full of kids dancing. And it just, it was really refreshing and interesting. And it sparked my homesickness for Louisiana.”
“The thrust of the documentary is hearing the live music. Because that’s kind of what it’s all about.” —Jeremey Lavoi
At the time, the pair had been making music documentary content for Pandora through their company Lavoi Creative. So, they began reaching out to these younger Cajun artists. They met the band Feufollet in 2014 at South by Southwest in Austin, befriended them, and followed them to San Francisco two months later to film two of their shows—all with the intent of making a “mini doc” centered on the band. “And so that was the beginning of Roots of Fire, of the journey, was that shoot,” Jeremey said. “But over the course of that time, the project sort of changed a lot, it evolved.”
Initially, he and Abby were working to produce digital shorts with the Cajun and Zydeco content they were capturing. As time went on, they narrowed their focus from both Cajun and Zydeco artists to the five Cajun musicians whose work and thoughts are included in the final film.
In Roots of Fire, considerable screen time is devoted to educating the viewer about the history of the French language being made illegal in Louisiana and the steep rate at which Louisiana’s Francophone population is being lost, emphasizing why it is so important that Cajun musicians continue to sing and write music in French today. And of course, pulsing through these more serious and educational moments is the electric energy of the remarkable footage gathered from live musical performances at festivals, concerts, fais-do-dos, and beyond. “The thrust of the documentary is hearing the live music,” Lavoi said. “Because that’s kind of what it’s all about.”
Roots of Fire had its world premiere at the Oxford Film Festival in March of 2022, and will be screened at the New Orleans Film Festival this year on November 6 at 8 pm at the Broadside—with a pre-screening concert by Wilson Savoy and Jourdan Thibodeaux—and on November 8 at 2:45 pm at the Broad Theater. It will also receive a “hometown premiere” at the Southern Screen Festival in Lafayette on the weekend of November 10.
[Read more about the Southern Screen Festival, here.]
A Taste of Heaven
Though gospel singer Raymond Anthony Myles’s name and voice may not be as widely recognized as Mahalia Jackson’s, his personal and musical legacy looms just as large in New Orleans—and perhaps even more colorfully. The documentary A Taste of Heaven takes on the monumental task of depicting Myles’s larger-than-life persona, and the many ways he impacted New Orleans and gospel music at large—despite the discrimination he faced as a Black, gay man, and his tragic murder at the age of forty-one.
It makes sense that such an unconventional musician’s life would be preserved by an unconventional documentarian: Grammy-winning music producer and Rutgers University Adjunct Professor Leo Sacks, who recorded Myles’s only full-length studio albums back in 1995, and who recognized how singularly special Myles was the very first time he saw him perform at Jazz Fest in 1982.
Sacks recalls his first Jazz Fest experience with a sort of reverent nostalgia—the scent of fried oysters on the breeze and the cold strawberry lemonade he held as he walked into the Gospel Tent that first time are forever affixed into his memory. “And there he was: Liberace meets Little Richard, prowling the stage, his choir in bright, chromatic colors behind him,” Sacks recalled. “I knew he was a gospel artist, but it was the most special music I had ever heard. And it spoke to me in a way that music never had.”
Sacks had attended the festival on assignment from Billboard magazine, and he described the experience in those pages. He returned to the Gospel Tent the following year, and this time he introduced himself to Myles. He began attending Myles’s choir’s rehearsals in a shotgun house, and Sacks soon realized Myles’s impact extended far beyond his music. Having grown up in the St. Bernard projects, Myles was more than a performer—he was a public school music teacher and community activist. “He was a kid from the projects and he became a role model for anyone with a voice and determination to sing. And, you know, the kids looked at him like he was a Pied Piper—he had the flashy clothes, he liked cars, he liked jewelry. And he preached education as a path out of poverty,” Sacks said. “I recognized that this man was more than a singer. He was more than a pianist, he was more than an arranger and a choir director. He was a surrogate mother and father, an uncle, an older brother, a confidant, he was a mentor, he was a role model.”
"Along with everyone there and the power of these voices lifting up—I compare it to a being strapped in a rocket ship and blasting off, because the voices raised the roof, they went to the heavens. It was astonishing." —Leo Sacks
During those rehearsals, Sacks was the only white person in that shotgun house, and he hadn’t even been raised within the Christian faith. But the music and energy Myles and his choir created captivated him spiritually on a deeper level than he’d ever experienced. “Raymond gave me the chance to feel the power of unconditional love. No one ever asked me to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I was just being given the opportunity to feel and to love and to reflect and to dream. Along with everyone there and the power of these voices lifting up—I compare it to a being strapped in a rocket ship and blasting off, because the voices raised the roof, they went to the heavens. It was astonishing. And there was Raymond in front of everyone, we were all looking at Raymond, he was at the keyboard, and he had his fan on his keyboard. And he was a one-man band. And he was a human jukebox.”
Sacks went on to record an album of Myles and The R.A.M.S. (The Raymond Anthony Myles Singers) in 1994. “So, I got Raymond’s music to people at the highest levels of the pop and R&B and gospel [industries], and everyone rejected the record we made,” Sacks shared, the disappointment still audible in his voice decades later. “I was told that we made content for art, not commerce…and that the perception that Raymond was queer was too alienating for gospel’s evangelical fans. He said, ‘Don’t they know that I’m talented? And if I’m a Christian man, doesn’t that make me a child of God, too?’ And it was crushing. It was absolutely crushing.”
Even more crushing and unexpected was when Myles was murdered in the fall of 1998—shot three times while driving his white Navigator just outside the French Quarter. Sacks recalled speaking at his service at Greater Saint Stephen Full Gospel. “I remember standing over his open casket—he was fully clad in snakeskin. There were four thousand people. And you know, I wondered what would happen to his legacy.”
When the levees failed following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Sacks was sitting in at Patsy’s Italian restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, watching the devastation unfold on CNN. He turned to his friend, the late Andy Kowalczyk, and said, “Someone has to start the healing process, and it’s got to begin with music.” Kowalczyk, despite never having visited New Orleans, wrote Sacks a check in response. “That allowed me to bring all of my favorite piano ticklers, and rhythm and blues singers, and Mardi Gras Indians, and brass band players, and funkiteers to Austin, Texas,” Sacks said. He formed a house band that included such New Orleans music royalty as Ivan Neville, Henry Butler, Raymond Weber, George Porter Jr., and Leo Nocentelli; featured guest artists included everyone from Irma Thomas, to Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, to John Boutté. They recorded an album within six weeks after the hurricane, titled Sing Me Back Home. “And everyone there knew Raymond, and he should have been there,” Sacks said. “And that’s when I decided I had to make this documentary.”
So, Sacks embarked on writing, producing, and directing his first documentary project, driven to share the life and message of the man who had such a profound spiritual impact on him and others. What Sacks lacked in filmmaking experience, he made up for in storytelling ability and connections, both to those from the New Orleans music community and from Raymond’s personal life: featured interviewees in the documentary who testify to Raymond’s talent, impact, eccentricities, and life story include everyone from New Orleans music greats like Allen Toussaint, Big Freedia, Cyril Neville, and Irma Thomas; to Raymond’s son and daughter, his sister JoAnn, and The R.A.M.S. JoAnn Myles was also instrumental in providing Sacks with a “treasure trove” of archival tapes of Myles performing at church services, concerts, and beyond, which contribute to depicting Myles’s powerful talent and stage presence.
The film portrays Myles as a musician, teacher, and activist—projecting his musical life and legacy, which Sacks believes tells a universal story of a struggle for artistic acceptance and spiritual fulfillment in two unforgiving worlds: the gospel music business and the Baptist Church. “In telling the story, about his struggle for acceptance, it also involves overcoming racism, and bigotry, and intolerance and homophobia, and judgment. You know, his message was so powerful to me that I was able to tell myself the truth about the spiritual condition of my own life, and that I needed to make changes,” Sacks said. “If he could do that for me. Can you imagine? Imagine the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of students and choir members and every day Orleanians he must have touched?”
A Taste of Heaven was first screened as a sneak peek at New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation in May 2022. The film will have another preview screening at the New Orleans Film Festival on November 5 at 8 pm at Second Line Stages, with an anticipated release in 2023 (either in June for Pride Month or October for the anniversary of Myles’s death).
Only on the North Side
The demographics of North Baton Rouge have shifted considerably over the course of the decades. But as the neighborhood evolved from a majority-white community to a majority-Black one, the student body of Redemptorist High School on Plank Road demographically remained the same. The Catholic high school, opened in 1947, continued to enroll almost exclusively white students into the 1990s, even as the neighborhood around it changed. “So now the whole area of town becomes Black, but the high school is still the same,” Adam Chenevert, the director of Only on the North Side, said. In 1997, Redemptorist’s football team hadn’t won a state championship since 1959. At points, the school was on the verge of closing down, with only around two hundred students in attendance.
Then, Coach Sid Edwards arrived at Redemptorist. Edwards was an alumni of the school himself, and had a plan to improve the school’s sports performance by extending financial assistance to neighborhood residents who wouldn’t otherwise have the means to attend. “So, he goes out and starts offering opportunities for a lot of the inner city kids who couldn’t afford to go there, and created a way for them to attend,” Chenevert explained. “Obviously, the sports teams start looking a little different at this point in time, right? They start winning championships, and it happened very fast.” Within around six years of “Coach Sid’s” arrival, the population of the student body was up to over eight hundred students, with a massively successful sports program. In 2000, they returned to the championships—winning in 2002 for the first time in forty years. They won again in 2003, then again in 2005. In 2015, the school closed down.
“Granted, if you’re from South Louisiana, you know that we still are battling some of these old issues of race. And it’s directly in front of our face. So, at the end of the day, I believe one thing that people always come together on is athletics.” —Adam Chenevert
Chenevert knew about how diversifying the student body fueled Redemptorist’s football comeback in part because his older brother had played football at Redemptorist as part of Edwards’s second class of students. A big Black kid who showed a lot of promise on the field and off, other Catholic high schools in Baton Rouge had offered him scholarships to attend. “But Redemptorist was the one that had the most people that actually, I mean, just looked like him,” Chenevert recalled. “Coach Sid just made him feel like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna make you feel like home over here. We’re not gonna make make you feel like an alien in this environment. We’re building something here. We want you here.”
After having the idea to make a documentary based on Redemptorist’s story, Chenevert, who had more experience in music than film, going by the name Adam Dollar$ as a rap and hip-hop artist, tweeted “I’m gonna work on my first film this year.” Within hours, the announcement had generated excitement. “And it just catches a bunch of fire, like, hundreds, hundreds of hundreds of retweets and likes on Twitter and stuff,” Chenevert said. A producer, Jordan Lewis, asked if he would be interested in doing his first film with Louisiana Public Broadcasting.
When Chenevert pitched his documentary to Louisiana Public Broadcasting Executive Producer Linda Midgett in December 2021, she loved the story and wanted to help actualize it as a two-part documentary. Around a month and a half later, they were signing paperwork to put gears in motion, and have been working on the film ever sense. Redemptorist’s is an important story to tell, Chenevert explained, because it serves as an example of how Louisiana’s obsession with sports often acts as a unifier in a state that still struggles with racism. “Granted, if you’re from South Louisiana, you know that we still are battling some of these old issues of race. And it’s directly in front of our face. So, at the end of the day, I believe one thing that people always come together on is athletics,” he said. “Redemptorist Field, Majella Field, that’s one of the few places you can go in the South, and you actually see shared enthusiasm between different demographics—like you see shirt and ties, and then you see gold teeth, and they all cheer for the same thing. And I think that is important.”
Only on the North Side is currently in production, and has an estimated premiere date of summer 2023 on Louisiana Public Broadcasting. To donate to the production, contact Jeanne Smith, Director of Corporate Support for Friends of LPB at jsmith@lpb.org.
Rhythms of the Land
In the beginning of the twentieth century, more than 920,000 Black families in the United States lived and worked on farms—usually as tenant farmers or sharecroppers. In the last century, there has been a steep decline in Black farming families, down to fewer than 50,000.
Dr. Gail Myers, director of Rhythms of the Land, believes in the importance of preserving the stories and legacies of African American agrarian families from the time of enslavement through the present day, especially since their way of life is rapidly disappearing. In partnership with the organization Farms to Grow, Inc., which “advocates for Black farmers and other underserved farmers across the country,” Myers has turned her decades of research on African American agrarians and their way of life into the documentary film Rhythms of the Land.
“These interviews represent generations of cultural traditions of Black farming philosophy that honors land, sustainability, God, family and love for their community.” —Dr. Gail Myers
In 2012, Myers spent the summer traveling to ten different Southern states (Texas, Arkansas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee), where she interviewed dozens of Black farmers, sharecroppers, gardeners, and even a fifth-generation basket weaver with the goal of preserving and sharing their stories. During that summer Myers gathered rich oral histories from a swath of individuals across generations, some as elderly as one-hundred-and-nine.
“Suffice it to say, the wisdom and personalities of the elder farmers are infectious,” Myers said in her Director’s Statement about the film. “These interviews represent generations of cultural traditions of Black farming philosophy that honors land, sustainability, God, family and love for their community.”
Rhythms of the Land will be screened at the 2023 Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration February 23–24, and is currently on a twelve-month, twelve-city screening tour with screenings this month at the New York Botanical Garden and Stanford.
Hollow Tree
While working with the climate change educational organization Ripple Effect, it struck New Orleans documentary filmmaker Kira Akerman that students living in Louisiana lacked a real understanding of how the environmental crisis would affect them. “I was thinking about why was it that none of these students knew that the city of New Orleans was sinking? Why were they expressing dismay that no one had ever told this to them before?”
In pursuit of answers, Akerman set out to make the 2017 film Station 15, with support from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, Tulane’s Center for the Gulf South, and Ripple Effect. Station 15 is about a young person learning about the New Orleans drainage system, and how the city’s pumping system has shaped their life. “I think a lot of people feel alienated from their infrastructure systems. Especially women, but people more broadly, and how do you bring in the largest possible audience?” Akerman asked. “How do you make people feel like infrastructures are for them? And important, and intimate, and not just something that you can pretend doesn’t exist?”
“It’s not only a film about people experiencing climate change, but it’s about young people understanding how climate change is fundamentally altering who we are." —Kira Akerman.
Similarly to Station 15, Akerman’s new film Hollow Tree aims to connect viewers more closely with their environmental infrastructures through the perspectives of young people who grew up in Louisiana, and are learning about these infrastructures for the first time. Akerman clarifies that the three young women featured in Hollow Tree are not merely subjects of the film, but rather were active participants in shaping the narrative, because it was their own. “I see them as active participants,” Akerman said. “They were genuinely learning through the process of making the film, and contributing to what the film became through asking questions, and collaborating with each other and me.”
It was important to Akerman that the three young women came from distinctly different backgrounds and could speak to their shared experience of flooding and climate change from those unique perspectives. One of the protagonists immigrated to Baton Rouge from Angola, Africa when she was six; another is a Cajun girl based in Lafayette; another is connected to the Houma Native American community in Terrebonne Parish. “They all kind of brought really unique and particular experiences based on their geography, and also based on their identities,” Akerman reflected.
By presenting Louisiana’s intimate and complex relationship with environmental changes through these young voices discovering and gaining ownership of their surroundings, Hollow Tree educates its audience about the impact humans have on their geography, while also underscoring the ways climate change impacts us in return. “It’s not only a film about people experiencing climate change, but it’s about young people understanding how climate change is fundamentally altering who we are,” Akerman explained.
Hollow Tree will receive its world premiere and the launch of its impact campaign at the New Orleans Film Festival this year, with screenings November 5 and 7.
Voices of Renewal
Kouri-Vini, also known as Louisiana Creole, has experienced a resurgence in recent years—though with fewer than 10,000 speakers as of 2010, the Louisiana-indigenous language is still greatly at risk of being lost. The Nous Foundation, which was founded to serve as “an independent platform for exchange between the United States and the French-Speaking world,” has taken up the cause of helping preserve Kouri-Vini by chronicling its current resurgence in their short documentary Voices of Renewal. Nous Foundation co-founders Scott Tilton (from New Orleans) and Rudy Bazenet (from France) met Los Angeles-based Autumn Palen, who now serves as the Nous Foundation (and the film’s) artistic director, when the three were in Paris.
Palen was passionate both about filmmaking and the French language—California offered plenty of opportunities in the former, but not so much the latter. She was drawn to the Nous Foundation’s mission of French language preservation, and wanted to help tell the Louisiana Creole chapter of that story, particularly in this moment when the language is experiencing a resurgence. “This is a nice sort of sweet spot in terms of sharing and spreading the word [about Kouri-Vini’s resurgence], because we’re kind of on what I would hope is just the very beginning of an upswing,” said Palen.
“I really hope that anyone who comes across Voices of Renewal gets even even a little spark of that joy and excitement in watching it, as I did making it.” —Autumn Palen
The film focuses on five individuals from Louisiana who are in some way devoted to carrying on the Kouri-Vini language. One is Clif St. Laurent, originally from Baton Rouge, who is a professional musician, singer, dancer, and actor based in Los Angeles; who also works as a freelance translator and transcriber of Kouri-Vini. He says he started learning the language when he was around seventeen years old, and doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that that is also when his professional career as a performer began. “In some kind of mystical, mysterious, magical way, the two are very closely intertwined,” St. Laurent says in the film. “I haven’t figured out the nuances yet, but they’re both a very special part of my life, and a special part of who I am.”
Voices of Renewal also turns its lens to Jonathan “Radbwa Faroush” Mayers, also from Baton Rouge, a visual artist and the Poet Laureate of Baton Rouge. Mayers, who conducts his interviews for the film entirely in Kouri-Vini with English subtitles, explained that he learned the language after his Mythologies Louisianaises exhibition at Arthur Roger Gallery in 2018. “I asked people to help me translate everything [for that exhibition] into Kouri-Vini (Louisiana Creole), because I recognized it was important.”
[Read more about Mayers' work in the visual arts in this story from our November 2019 issue, and read one of his poems, in Kour-Vini, in our August 2021 issue.]
Another featured proponent of Louisiana Creole is Tiffany Guillory Thomas, from Lake Charles, who hosts the program Entre Nous (en Français, of course) for Nous Foundation. Then there is New Orleans’ Givonna Joseph, the founder and artistic director of OperaCréole—an organization, “dedicated to researching and performing lost or rarely-produced operatic and classical works by composers of African descent; with a special emphasis on nineteenth century New Orleans free composers of color.” The final Kouri-Vini speaker in Voices of Renewal is Julien Gills, also from New Orleans, who began teaching themself Louisiana Creole only a year and a half ago—reminding viewers it’s not too late for them to start learning, too.
Palen said that between conducting her interview with Mayers entirely in French (with her asking questions in French and him responding in Kouri-Vini, still able to understand each other), talking with Gills about modifying Louisiana Creole for the non-binary identity, and all of the other profoundly educational moments during the film’s production, she hopes audiences learn as much and glean as much excitement from the project as she did. She says that organizations like the Nous Foundation, whose mission alongside French language preservation is to uplift otherwise unrepresented voices, “spark so much hope and so much of a fire in my soul … it’s just an undying love and gratitude for every aspect,” Palen said. “I really hope that anyone who comes across Voices of Renewal gets even even a little spark of that joy and excitement in watching it, as I did making it.”
Voices of Renewal has been shown on WYES (PBS) through October. Palen and the Nous Foundation are still in search of “a more permanent home for the documentary,” so keep an eye out for updates about future screenings.