Intention

Within a sprawling cypress grotto, a small blue-and-white figurine stands erect. Protected underneath the trunk’s massive, overarching roots, the statue of the Virgin Mary, her hands outdrawn, illuminates the dark gap between trunk and earth, beckoning stray onlookers in.

The evocative visual style of Intention, the forthcoming documentary film from Lafayette-based filmmakers Syd Horn and Olivia Perillo, can be encapsulated in striking, moody dreamscapes such as this, captured through their joint approach to finding the light amidst darkness. Chronicling the myriad ways the divine feminine manifests in the regional culture of South Louisiana is the driving force of Intention. The fifty-minute feature weaves together the narratives of twelve women across the rural prairies and enigmatic swamplands of Acadiana. The dozen subjects have each dedicated years, or lifetimes, to the pursuit of art, healing, music, cuisine, and craft.

 The film’s title asserts its undertaking—to investigate why its subjects are committed to their trade through the lens of cultural preservation. Against the backdrop of a mystic culture imbued with the natural world, Horn and Perillo unravel the confines that determine which stories are traditionally told in South Louisiana, and who gets to tell them.

This type of nuanced storytelling is not new territory for Horn and Perillo, who previously collaborated on a short film entitled Migration for the 2018 KINOMADA short film creation laboratory. Created in ten days and shot on the lush banks of Lake Martin, the film explores the concept of home and its differing interpretations for three women. 

“You really have to ask yourself what’s the most important part of their story. Is it their struggle? Is it what they do, or is it a combination? What empowers people? I think that’s something we’ve really had to consider, and that’s probably the biggest gift that we’ve received." —Syd Horn

 Intention will premiere at the New Orleans French Film Festival later this month, as part of the CREATE Louisiana French Culture Film Grant the pair was awarded for the project last summer. Nearly a third of Intention is in French, but the film doesn’t examine our state’s francophone heritage from the familiar European French or Cajun French perspective alone. To shed a more historically accurate light on South Louisiana’s cultural and linguistic roots, Horn and Perillo also thread in Louisiana’s vital Black Creole, Haitian, African, Chitimacha, and Canary Islander influences, which are often buried in the mainstream collective memory.

Though the filmmakers remained behind the camera, they each described the way this project’s process of documentation lended itself to an ongoing exchange between directors and subject, leaving both profoundly changed. To ask perhaps the most philosophical of questions—“why?—and present an onscreen response requires a depth of vulnerability, intimacy, and trust built over time, and Horn and Perillo inevitably developed fierce bonds with the women in the film. 

[Read this: Ashlee Michot is a mother, an artist, and a fierce ambassador of her Louisiana French culture.]

 “It’s made me really evaluate my own life while going through it and taking their stories in and seeing how I relate to that at the same time,” said Perillo. “Women who, before, wouldn’t share the depth of where they come from and where their art comes from—it breaks down these timelines and illusions we place on ourselves in exchange for what’s important,” added Horn. 

The pair, both Louisiana natives, found themselves reflecting on their shared culture and reckoning with the complexities of recognition—which can ensure cultural longevity, but isn’t always relevant to those one aims to recognize. In a pre-production film sample, a Breaux Bridge traiteur articulates the enduring history of women in these intergenerational disciplines and their staying power, despite a lack of formal acknowledgement. “The word traiteur is masculine, because at one time women held no positions of professionalism,” she said. “There’s no female word for ‘lawyer.’There’s no female word for ‘doctor.’ Everybody in the Nouveau French movement who wanted to make everything right is now saying, ‘oh, we have to say traiteurse,’ but no we don’t, because women were always that; it didn’t matter what you called them, you went by that word. We cannot correct grammar and pretend we made anything right.”

[Read this: Cheryl Gerber's new photography book celebrates the achievements and character of New Orleans women.]

“There are very few resources on women when discussing South Louisiana,” said Horn. “If you Google women’s documentaries in South Louisiana, you’ll probably see prison documentaries, crime, poverty; it’s obvious that women are misrepresented, but something that I think has been really powerful has been to show that under the umbrella of French culture film, it doesn’t really matter.” Women have always, and will always, do meaningful work, she said, whether there is recognition or not—”because that’s what they have to do.” And the value of their work is neither increased nor diminished because of it. 

Due to the close-knit nature of Acadiana’s creative community, several of the film’s women already knew one another or had encountered each other’s work. “This project literally could not happen in any other place, because you can’t build this web of people who have met or are meeting each other, without us having to introduce them, anywhere else,” Horn said. 

With multiple subjects and just under an hour of runtime, Horn and Perillo were tasked with delivering the crux of each woman’s story to an audience, a responsibility they did not take lightly. “You really have to ask yourself what’s the most important part of their story. Is it their struggle? Is it what they do, or is it a combination? What empowers people? I think that’s something we’ve really had to consider, and that’s probably the biggest gift that we’ve received,” said Horn. 

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 A fragment from the film’s fundraising campaign encapsulates the two auteurs’ painstaking, carefully wrought approach: “We are dedicated to this initiative, in hopes to arrive at hard truths with gentleness.” The documentary’s log line—“Hidden in Cajun Country live angels among us”—similarly echoes a sense of reverence for the sensitive process of making visible what is hidden. 

“We wanted to channel those feelings into something that gives perspective to a community, especially the voiceless unseen community,” said Horn. Added Perillo, “Documenting these women in a very honest, yet beautiful way—it’s easy to capture.”

It all feels like the revelation of something powerful and precious, a secret that’s been there the whole time, coming, at long last, into light. 

Intention will premiere at the New Orleans French Film Festival, February 27-March 4 at the Prytania Theatre. For more information on the festival or to purchase tickets, visit neworleansfilmsociety.org.

Editor's Note: In the original publication of this article, the Chitimacha tribe—whose influence in Louisiana's culture and in this film is monumental—was not listed along with the Cajun, European French, Black Creole, Haitian, African, and Canary Islander cultures represented in Intention. In our hope to celebrate a project shedding such light on cultural groups that have often been underrepresented in our state's narrative, Country Roads is deeply apologetic to Intention's filmmakers and to the Chitimacha tribe for this oversight.