Photo by Lawless Bourque
Only yesterday, it seems, I was interviewing Jeff Dowd—the real-life inspiration for The Big Lebowski’s “The Dude”—about his involvement in organizing the inaugural Louisiana International Film Festival (LIFF). As it turns out, South Louisiana is a great place for a film festival, as the growth of the festival attests: Louisiana has culture and artisanship in spades, a wealth of inspiring food, and too many dive bars with napkins worth writing on to count. So while it may seem like yesterday, it's actually been three years; and I’m back again to check in on the festival’s third iteration, this time from a filmmaker’s perspective.
The filmmaker is Baton Rougean Jeff Roedel, known locally as a writer and editor, most recently at the helm of [225] Magazine. Though his career led him in the direction of words, his friends have always know him as a filmmaker at heart—and this year, he fulfilled a dream by submitting a short film to the LIFF.
Jeff, who left his longtime editorial role at [225] in October 2014, joined the ranks at Louisiana Economic Development; in that same month, he and his team wrapped up the final editing stages of Forever Waves, starring New Orleans-based musician Kristin Diable. The film, reviewed by a panel of judges and accepted for screening at the LIFF, can already be promoted as award-winning, having earned the Award of Excellence in the Best Shorts Competition.
Roedel and Diable, who met long ago on either side of a radio interview at KLSU, when Diable was barely out of her teens, collaborated on the writing. The twenty-five-minute short centers on Diable, who plays a musician best characterized as a one-album wonder. At the film's start, she's returning to her childhood home in Louisiana, after a brief brush with Hollywood fame, in search of something she must have forgotten—her self, her place in the world—in the fields of dreamy Breaux Bridge. The theme is familiar and will resonate with Louisiana's native twenty- and thirty-somethings. After all, boomerang-babies abound here, crossing state borders only to return years later, like wild salmon homing in on that long-lost spawning ground, fueled by bare instinct.
“It's a theme I hope people everywhere can relate with.” Roedel said. “It's something I have done; it's something Kristin has done. We leave home, and we come back. We've all lost friends and family to it.”
Actor David Jensen, best known for his roles in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Ocean's Eleven, and Schizopolis, plays Diable's father, Jonah, in Forever Waves. Jonah is a little off-his-rocker; he greets his long-lost daughter with a bow and arrow, wearing a long blonde wig that is acknowledged in the scene but goes unexplained. In the next scene, he asks her how many keys he has in his pocket; he has none, and he's proud of it. It doesn't take long to see that they're two peas in a pod—they're the same kind of weird, and the real value of their connection hadn't occurred to Clara [Diable] until that moment.
The film is full of similarly subtle exchanges, and for the most part, they are shown, not explained. “It was important to me that certain feelings came across,” Roedel explained. “There are monologues and dialogue; but in editing, you kind of have to cut back a lot of things, and I would rather a person feel it than say, 'I understood every plot point inside and out, but I didn't relate to any of the characters.'”
Due to the proximity of talent and infrastructure, Louisiana's status as a second Hollywood has made it possible for small-time filmmakers, like Jeff and Kristin, to express themselves on the big screen. No matter how many spare hours and weekends it took Roedel's five- to six-person crew to assemble twenty-five minutes of polished film, the Louisiana International Film Festival exists to make sure theirs—and those of so many other small-timers whose blood and sweat is poured into these sorts of projects—gets the audience it deserves.
This year, LIFF takes place May 7 through May 10, with themed showings at the Perkins Rowe Cinemark in Baton Rouge. Watch a block of over two hours of Louisiana-made short films, including Forever Waves, Based on Rosenthal, A Bird's Nest, Lovable, Madeline's Oil, Snip, and True Heroes on Saturday, May 9, starting at 10 am. For full schedules and more information, visit lifilmfest.org. For a trailer of Forever Waves, click here.
