A Slice of Our Silver Screen

As per Country Roads’ Film issue tradition, our editorial team is thrilled to celebrate five exciting projects by Louisiana filmmakers—exploring the nuance and evolutions of Louisiana culture through documentaries about roots music, the visual arts, and the Black experience. This year, we’re also featuring two narrative feature projects that capture the stories that erupt from the distinct sense of place found in our small towns—inspiring complex characters in communities equally beautiful and fraught.  

[Read our roundups from 2022 here and 2023 here.]

Musique(s)! 

An ambitious addition to the existing body of literature documenting and celebrating Louisiana’s distinct musical heritage, a new project by the New Orleans Foundation for Francophone Cultures (otherwise known as NOUS) aims to capture a snapshot of Louisiana French music today, in the twenty-first century.  

Musique(s)!, which will premiere at the New Orleans French Film Festival in 2025, is a twenty-minute documentary, funded by a CreateLouisiana grant, which tells the stories of six modern day musical groups performing a range of musical genres in Louisiana French or Creole. 

Directed by Cory St. Ewart, with Autumn Palen as director of photography, the film is an extension of NOUS's project in partnership with Library of Congress, which will culminate in a twelve-track vinyl record featuring two songs by each group. 

“The idea,” said Scott Tilton, co-founder and co-director of NOUS, “was to celebrate Louisiana roots music and look at these musicians who choose to sing in these languages, and focus on how they are transmitting them. What’s so interesting and unique about the dynamism of this music is that people who hear it don’t necessarily understand all of the lyrics, but they’re still attracted to the music. And the musicians are adapting it, racking up Grammys.” 

Musicians featured on the album and in the film include New Orleans indie rock band Sweet Crude; Ryan Harrison’s Les Cenelles—a chamber music ensemble performing works by Afro-descendant peoples; Bruce Sunpie Barnes and his “Afro Louisiana” blend of zydeco, blues, and Afro-Cuban music; women from the Baby Dolls New Orleans Mardi Gras traditions; and Grammy Award winning musicians Leyla McCalla and Louis Michot. 

Tilton said that he gave the artists full license to choose which songs they would contribute to the album, the only requirement being that they be sung in Louisiana French or Creole. As he and the team at NOUS were organizing the logistics of recording the album, Tilton said that it dawned on them that “this would be a sick documentary.” 

Capturing behind-the-scenes footage of the album being made, in combination with conversations and interviews with the artists themselves, St. Ewart approached the film, his first documentary, with a research-heavy, story-first mindset taking inspiration from award-winning contemporary filmmakers Alexandra Kern (Wild Magnolias, 2022) and Jean Chapiro Uziel (Hasta Encontrarlos (Till We Find Them), 2022). 

“The idea was to celebrate Louisiana roots music and look at these musicians who choose to sing in these languages, and focus on how they are transmitting them. What’s so interesting and unique about the dynamism of this music is that people who hear it don’t necessarily understand all of the lyrics, but they’re still attracted to the music. And the musicians are adapting it, racking up Grammys.” — Scott Tilton, co-founder and co-director of NOUS 

“When we’re watching documentaries that move us, they feel like narratives,” said St. Ewart, referring to the musicians he features as characters or protagonists, rather than subjects. “I’ve seen a ton of documentaries about Louisiana, and Louisiana music specifically, and you can learn a lot from those. But there hasn’t been a lot where I felt like I knew the people and went through a narrative journey. I was informed, but I wasn’t moved. We really, really looked at that in how we wanted to construct this piece.”  

In considering this project’s place alongside the existing body of documentaries and books on Louisiana music, St. Ewart wanted to shift the focus from the art itself onto the artists. “We asked the musicians why they create, what moved them to start creating music in French, and their relationships to the French language here in Louisiana,” he said. “I would love for this work to be another blueprint for the kinds of stories that we can tell about our culture in Louisiana.” 

Musique(s)! fits directly into St. Ewart’s oeuvre, which aims to broadcast stories from his home state to the larger world, while also inspiring Louisiana artists to take hold of their culture and “go places they never thought they would go.” Louisiana’s musicians have been the leaders in this transmission, St. Ewart points out, more than any other art form. “Their talents go across the world.” 

As St. Ewart makes the final edits on the film, he said that he gets chills every time he presses play. “I’m proud of it, yes,” he said. “But the chills came from it just being so cool.” 

Musique(s)! will premiere in 2025 at the New Orleans French Film Festival and will be broadcast on TV5MONDE during the Mois de la Francophonie in March 2025. From February–May 2025, NOUS and the Historic BK House & Gardens will present an exhibition in the French Quarter, featuring an immersive, multimedia experience exploring Louisiana’s musical heritage. nous-foundation.org. 

Ghetto Children 

“Legacy is something that you carry, something you can’t let die. It’s like a foundation that you get passed on from generation to generation.” This quote comes from T.Y., one of the young subjects of Zac Manuel’s first feature-length documentary. The statement precedes a scene of T.Y., the son of Cash Money Millionaires and Hot Boy$ rapper B.G., going into a tattoo shop in New Orleans to begin the process of recreating elements of the tableau on his father’s chest. 

In another scene, Young Juve—son of fellow Millionaire and Hot Boy$ legend Juvenile—discusses his rap career on a video call in a Burger King. “I’m not the type of person who’s like ‘oh my daddy’s Juvenile so I’m a go out there and be like . . . nah,” he says. “Like everything I do is on my own. I’ma do it my way.” He points out that he doesn’t rap like his father, nor does he act like his father. “Like I got dreads with colorful hair and gauges in my ear, you feel me? You woulda never thought I was Juvenile’s son.” 

Manuel and producer Chris Haney first discovered the Ghetto Children, the rap group made up of T.Y., Young Juve, and Lil’ Soulja Slim—son of the late Soulja Slim—in 2016.

Haney was listening to a song that he at first assumed was new music by B.G. Except that at the time, B.G. was incarcerated. Haney wondered, “How is B.G. making and releasing music from federal prison?” Then he discovered it was the work of the next generation, the progeny of the legendary 1990s and early 2000s New Orleans rap scene. 

Still early in their careers as filmmakers—“really just in a punk rock radical space of let’s go grab a camera and go out and shoot and see what we capture,” as Manuel described it—he and Haney thought that the story of these three New Orleans rap legacies might make a fascinating short film. After the first six weeks of shooting, though, it was evident that this was something more. “Eventually we decided it needed to be a feature,” said Manuel. 

“It was really this process of exploring what it means to be in the shoes they fill, and what it means to fill this space that their fathers left behind, and in some cases that their fathers still inhabit. What does it mean to move through the world with the weight of those legacies, and to become an adult and start a family and figure out things about yourself, come into your own personhood?” —Zac Manuel, director of Ghetto Children

Eight years later, Ghetto Children premiered last month at the New Orleans Film Festival—representing an evolutionary span of Manuel and Haney’s careers as filmmakers, as well as almost a decade in the lives of their twenty-something-year-old subjects and their community. 

Today an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, Manuel’s body of documentary shorts have often explored the dichotomous personality of his native city when it comes to its Black life within it. 

“On one hand, New Orleans is really beautiful, and there’s really great culture and rich Black culture,” he said. “And then on the other hand, there’s the prevalence of over policing and over-incarcerating and infrastructural change that kind of destroys Black neighborhoods and displaces people. We’re holding both of those things at the same time. I think that’s what I’m thinking about a lot in my work, how the Black identity and the Black experience intersects with the dynamics of racism and systemic injustice, and specifically how those things intersect for Black men.” 

Ghetto Children steps right into these contradictions, as Manuel and Haney embed themselves into the worlds of T.Y., Young Juve, and Lil’ Soulja Slim. “It was really this process of exploring what it means to be in the shoes they fill, and what it means to fill this space that their fathers left behind, and in some cases that their fathers still inhabit,” said Manuel. “What does it mean to move through the world with the weight of those legacies, and to become an adult and start a family and figure out things about yourself, come into your own personhood?” 

Haney and Manuel started out shooting around four days a week, calling their subjects in the mornings to find out where they were, and then heading out with their equipment. “A lot of the time we spent together was pretty observational, close proximity observation. We wanted to just be flies on the wall. As we started doing that, we found points of intersection where we’d have conversations and ended up doing interviews, but they were really kind of informal, not-quite-sit-down interviews. Like let’s hang out on a couch and have a conversation.” These intimate snapshots are interspersed with exciting footage of the young rappers in the thrill of their creativity, spitting lines in the studio, making notes in journals, getting nervous for onstage performances in their community, and on tour in L.A. “Rap saved my life,” says T.Y., reflecting on the difficult years after his father’s conviction in 2012.

In placing a magnifying glass to the lives of these young men, Manuel hopes that audiences—regardless of their own backgrounds and experiences—might find “space for grace.” 

“One thing I wanted to explore in this film, especially when it comes to stories about Black men, is allowing room for imperfection, space where people are still in the process of growth, of discovery—where oftentimes there is an expectation of having something figured out, or striving toward some kind of righteous goal. It’s a story of what it means to be young and Black and not see many opportunities for yourself, and not see many depictions of yourself that you feel comfortable striving for. I want people to sit with that reality, and acknowledge that it is real for a lot of people, and I think they just offer a sense of understanding, or be inspired to ask questions.” 

In the weeks leading up to the film’s premiere, Manuel said that he was anxious to share it with the New Orleans community, and especially the rap community. “If people from the community watch it and they respond positively and it feels impactful to them, that’s the success,” he said. “That’s the metric.” zacmanuel.com. 

The Dirty South 

In Louisiana native Matthew Yerby’s debut narrative film, The Dirty South, Sue Parker is fighting for her family’s livelihood. She’s got seventy-two hours, and as the clock ticks away, desperation pushes her to places she never imagined she’d go. At one point, that includes racing down Cane River Lake in a stolen boat, laughing her head off. 

The night they filmed that scene, temperatures had just dropped down below thirty degrees. “A lot of the crew and some cast were from California,” said Yerby, the film’s director and writer. “These people didn’t know what twenty-nine degrees in Louisiana is like, on the water, in the dark. But I was so impressed with the team for actually getting through it together.” 

The character Sue, played by Willa Holland (The O.C., Gossip Girl), is inspired by the subject of Dion DiMucci’s song, “Runaround Sue,”—one of Yerby’s father’s favorites. “‘Runaround Sue’ is about a girl who says, ‘keep away,’” explained Yerby. “She’ll break your heart. And in the film, there are a lot of guys trying to get with Sue, but she has no time, no time whatsoever. She has to put food on the table for her little brother, make sure he’s got a roof over his head. And she has no help at home.” 

Sue’s love interest, who guides her in her escapades as she attempts to raise (steal) enough money to save her family bar, is Louisiana boy Shane West’s (A Walk to Remember) Dion, a character inspired by DiMucci’s “The Wanderer”— who, as Yerby describes it, “roams from town to town, nobody knows his name. He’s got two fists of iron. And he loves his car.” 

“There are a lot of great stories that don’t require a ton of locations, a ton of explosions, where the audience really cares about the relationships of the characters. And that’s what I love to watch, what I love to write. We’re all flawed people. We want to see how far people will go, what they will go through, to achieve what they have to do to protect the ones they love.” —Matthew Yerby, director of The Dirty South

In writing the screenplay, Yerby kept in mind advice from a mentor—“Write what you can actually produce.” It’s a huge reason why he decided to set the story in his hometown of Natchitoches, Louisiana. “This was my first ever feature film, so nobody really knew who I was,” he said. “It’s not like people were just going to hand me a lot of money to go shoot wherever I wanted.” In Natchitoches, he knew he’d have access to free sets in people’s homes. The boat they used? Someone lent it to them. And the bar that Sue was trying to save? It’s the bar Yerby worked in while he was in college. “That’s part of why I wanted to make her a bartender,” he said. 

The team transformed Point Place Marina—with its bar and parking lot and nearby trailers—into a Louisiana-style studio lot, where most of the film was filmed. “It was originally supposed to be a summertime film,” said Yerby. But when the middle of winter turned out to be the only time all of the actors were available, they went with it. “I really think it gave a much better tone to the film, this dark winter, this dirty south.” 

Yerby said that he took inspiration for The Dirty South from the 2016 neo-Western drama Hell or High Water which, despite its star studded cast and a script by Taylor Sheridan, operated on a relatively small budget of $12 million. “There are a lot of great stories that don’t require a ton of locations, a ton of explosions, where the audience really cares about the relationships of the characters,” he said. Momentum can be added with something as simple as a time clock, he pointed out. “And that’s what I love to watch, what I love to write. We’re all flawed people. We want to see how far people will go, what they will go through, to achieve what they have to do to protect the ones they love.” 

One of the main factors in emphasizing that momentum is the film’s original score—composed by Tyler Forrest and produced by Blake Phillips. Forrest, along with producer Andrew Vogel, met Yerby when the group of them were working as actors in New Orleans in 2013. He and Yerby locked themselves in a cabin after filming was completed and emerged two weeks later with the film’s soundtrack. “I wanted a very raunchy, rugged, Southern rock soundtrack,” said Yerby. “And I wanted it to show a lot of urgency. Tyler did just that, keeping the tempo of the music up.” 

In the year since its release, The Dirty South has been awarded the Best Cinematography award at the 2023 Chelsea Film Festival and been met with positive reception by critics and the public. “This was an incredible first film to have,” said Yerby. “It was one of the greatest learning experiences of my life and solidified that this is most definitely what I want to do for the rest of my life. And I hope that more people from around Louisiana will see that this is a very possible thing. You can shoot a film, and you can attract bigger talent. It might take longer and might take more hard work, but it is one hundred percent possible for someone from small town Louisiana to do this.” 

The Dirty South is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime and Apple TV.  

George Dureau: New Orleans Artist

In Sergio Andres Lobo-Navia and Jarret Lofstead’s documentary film George Dureau: New Orleans Artist, the subject, in archival footage, tells of the day when—after attending a film with Judy Garland or Hedy Lamarr or Lana Turner—he attended a freakshow on Canal Street. “On the third setup,” he recalls, meditatively, “on the right, on a platform sat a nice-looking man with no arms. He drew with a pencil held between the big toe and the long toe of his right foot. I wanted desperately for him to draw me. He had stared at me twice. He must have thought I was worth drawing.” 

Weeks or months later, Dureau was walking home with a girl from his class, who invited him over to her home. In the front room, sitting on a dining chair, is her uncle, the armless circus performer. And, “He drew me.”  

George Dureau (1930–2014) is remembered best today for his figurative works as a painter and photographer, and especially for his renderings of the male body—his models ranging from professional athletes to the disabled, and usually in the nude. “I’ve always, since childhood, I’ve been more than fascinated, just drawn totally to people who are handicapped. But particularly to people who are triumphant though handicapped,” he says of his iconic paintings and drawings of dwarves, of people without hands, without legs. 

The artist’s long life and career spanned the postwar era of New Orleans, the oil boom, the oil bust, and ultimately, the effects of Hurricane Katrina—which made Dureau the ideal subject for Andres Lobo-Navia and Lofstead. The two have been collaborating since 2008 when they met at Loyola, Andres Lobo-Navia as a student and Lofstead as a professor. As filmmakers, they share an interest in discussing and challenging the creative economy that emerged post-Katrina New Orleans, and found in Dureau’s an allegory for a New Orleans that has been lost. 

“He was this bastion of the final bohemian part of the Quarter, one of the last holdouts,” said Andres Lobo-Navia. Lofstead added, “a real New Orleanian, who intersected the white and Black communities, and the disabled community, and the gay community.” Driving down Esplanade in one archival shot, Dureau tells his passenger, “I’ve had so much fun and so much pain in so many houses along here. I’ve known murderers in these houses, fornicators, saints!” 

Lofstead recalls seeing Dureau riding his bike through the Quarter shortly after he arrived in the city in the late 1990s. “He was really part of the street, part of the French Quarter, really part of that life,” he said. “And then to learn that after he died of Alzheimer’s, he was kind of forgotten ...” 

Backed by an original score by various New Orleans musicians, including several dissonant, dreamlike sequences by pianist Oscar Rossignoli, the film traces the arc of Dureau’s life and career. The story is pieced together with archival interviews, footage, and some never-before-seen photographs largely sourced from the Historic New Orleans’ Collections’ holdings—“just boxes and boxes of videotapes and books, contact sheets, photographs, his journals,” said Lofstead. Dureau’s life is, to a large extent, narrated by the artist himself, who took part in several interviews over the course of his life, in addition to original interviews the filmmakers conducted with Dureau’s models, neighbors, his brother, and other contemporaries, including gallerist Arthur Roger—who represents Dureau’s work in his galleries to this day. 

“He was a real New Orleanian, who intersected the white and Black communities, and the disabled community, and the gay community.” —Jarret Lofstead, co-director of George Dureau: New Orleans Artist

One of the antagonists of Dureau’s career, as depicted in the film, was the much acclaimed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe—who Dureau himself argued took inspiration from his own work, though he distinguished his own photographs as depicting people “you can’t buy or use or handle”. 

Dureau’s contentions with Mapplethorpe were part of a larger rejection of New York City, a city for the ambitious, said Lofstead. New Orleans, by contrast, was and is a city “for the creative, but not for the ambitious.”  

“So, part of the underlying question is, you don’t necessarily get the opportunities or options or access here in New Orleans that you get in the big metropole,” said Lofstead. “So, do you stay deliberately? Do you do it unconsciously? Why are we here? And as New Orleans continues to change, what is left that is keeping us here?” 

Emphasizing the sense that the city’s spirit has been lost, on the day before he and Andres Lobo-Navia were to finalize the film in 2023, they were walking along Canal Street when they looked up at Harrah’s—where a Dureau sculpture had decorated the pediment of the casino since 1999. “And it was gone.” 

George Dureau: New Orleans Artist premiered at the 2023 New Orleans Film Festival; an updated version (which includes the loss of the Harrah’s pediment, among other additions) will be screened at The Broad Theatre on November 21 at 7 pm. dureaufilm.com. 

Pointe Noire 

One of Acadiana’s preeminent filmmakers, Pat Mire returns to the screen this year with his second narrative feature film, Pointe Noire. 

Mire, who made his first film on Louisiana culture in 1988, is best known for his illuminating documentaries, which explore everything from handfishing traditions in the Cajun bayous, to Louisiana folktales and roots music, to the iconic courirs of Acadiana. His debut feature film, Dirty Rice, told the story of a man returning home to a Cajun prairie challenged by the fickle rice industry, where he rediscovers his roots and a new appreciation for his home. The film premiered at the 1997 New Orleans Film Festival, was an official selection at the 1998 London Film Festival, and maintains the record for the film with the longest run (over five months) at Lafayette movie theaters. 

Almost thirty years later, Mire’s return to fictional storytelling is ironically one of his most personal projects yet. The story of a criminal defense attorney (played by Myriam Cyr, who also starred in Dirty Rice) and a filmmaker (played by Canadian actor Roy Dupuis) who come together to save the life of a falsely accused man on death row (played by Acadiana actor Michael Bienvenu)—Pointe Noire is a mirror of Mire’s own collaboration with his partner, Rebecca Hudsmith. 

Hudsmith, the Federal Public Defender for the Middle and Western Districts of Louisiana, has represented several clients on death row and argued cases all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. She met Mire in 2006 at the inaugural Cinema on the Bayou Festival, of which he is the founder and Artistic Director. Knowing of her work, and hoping to get her number, Mire approached Hudsmith with the line, 

“You know, I’m thinking of someday doing a film on folk justice.” 

“And now,” said Mire, “we’ve finally done it.” 

“The story is fictional. But at the same time, it goes to the heart of our lives.” —Rebecca Hudsmith

Hudsmith, who took writing courses at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette under Ernest Gaines, had herself toyed with the idea of writing about her work with death row inmates in some capacity. But the screenplay didn’t come together until 2020, when she and Mire found themselves quarantined and inspired to produce a story that brought their two worlds together. Hudsmith would write every weekend, and while she conducted her attorney work during the week, Mire would write his sections and edit. “We came up with a really beautiful routine and stuck to it for over a year,” said Hudsmith. 

“I didn’t shave for six months,” said Mire. “I said I would not shave or take a drink of wine until we had our first draft.” 

The resulting screenplay is a bilingual story set in the fictional Louisiana community of Pointe Noire, where years before, two people were killed the night of a traditional courir de Mardi Gras. During the protagonists’ investigation, the place emerges as a character of its own—captured anamorphically in an aesthetic reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s, a haunted and isolated corner of rural Louisiana bearing the weight of its own secrets. “I think we captured something really, really special that people from here are gonna get,” said Mire. “But people from far away are going to appreciate, too, the power of the story.” 

As a first-time screenwriter, Hudsmith said she has never in her life experienced a moment more surreal than hearing, for the first time, the actors speaking the lines she had written. “It was amazing,” she said. 

“The story is fictional,” she went on, describing the death row character Joel Richard as a composite of her clients over the course of thirty years. “But at the same time, it goes to the heart of our lives.”

Pointe Noire will have its red carpet world premiere on November 23 at the Festival International du Cinéma Francophone en Acadie (FICFA) in Moncton, New Brunswick and its Louisiana premiere on January 22 at the Cinema on the Bayou Festival in Lafayette.  patmire.com.