Courtesy of Daniel Fiore.
For over a decade now, the cinematographer Daniel Fiore has spent much of his time deep in the remote swamps around Lake Pontchartrain. He began by following the lore: stories of a wild man living alone in an unforgiving place, hunting rougarou, biting the heads off snakes, and searching for Jean Lafitte’s treasure. The existence of a “wild man,” for one, turned out to be true.
As his relationship with the “swamp man” evolved into a kind of friendship, Fiore’s angle shifted into something like a character study, which expanded into an exploration of place, and inevitably, of the history that shaped the mysterious ecosystem of the swamp itself, as well as the man who now calls it home: Shelby. The journey takes us through the long history of violence in lower Mississippi region, folklore about buried treasure and the feu follet, and stories about bootlegging, political corruption, and vigilantism.
When we first meet the namesake of Fiore’s film, his person is accompanied by the unholy sound of a loogie shamelessly hawked. “I’m a dirty son of a bitch,” he says, scrubbing his face, while admitting he hasn’t showered in six months (though he does always “wash his ass” in the lake). We meet Shelby’s dog, Piss Willy, and Fiore’s camera slowly peels back more and more of Shelby’s sprawling, chaotic world of tents, tools, machinery, and piles of what the average person could only deem as trash, scattered in campsites all across the swamp.
Shelby is the kind of storyteller that folks raised in rural South Louisiana will likely recognize—the stories are vulgar and outlandish, difficult to believe, but so fun to listen to that you stick around until the end. “Mama said when I was born, I was born dead,” he tells us of his origins. His body is covered with what he describes as alligator bites, snake bites, and gunshot wounds from a dust-up with a biker gang years before. His breakfast is a piece of raw venison he hung from a tree branch the night before. Early on, he tells Fiore that the swamp is rife with treasure, and that he knows where most of it is.
“I was always authentic with him, whether that was on camera or off. I think from the beginning he kind of sensed that of me. I feel that being pushy is the easy, crude, unrefined way of getting somebody to do something for you. The real art is working together with a talent, even if they don’t realize it.” —Daniel Fiore
Part of Shelby’s isolation in the swamp is a basic eccentricity, a preference for life in nature opposed to that in society. But part of this existence is also derived from a profound distrust of others that borders on paranoia. To tell Shelby’s story, Fiore knew that gaining his trust would be everything.
“I was always authentic with him, whether that was on camera or off,” he said. “I think from the beginning he kind of sensed that of me. I feel that being pushy is the easy, crude, unrefined way of getting somebody to do something for you. The real art is working together with a talent, even if they don’t realize it.”
To protect the tenuous trust he was building with Shelby, Fiore always filmed entirely on his own. “I was literally the one who filmed and shot everything,” he said. As a filmmaker, Fiore has found himself in this situation before—embedding himself in the Alaskan wilderness and on crab boats to shoot for projects like the Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch.
“I think it makes this project unique,” said Fiore. “It just had to be that way for various reasons, because of [Shelby’s] idiosyncrasies, as well as the resources it would take to have a big crew out there. And when you take up a large footprint, all that space with people, it also changes the vibe of the characters, their natural pacing day to day.”
Watching Shelby, it certainly feels as though Shelby forgets the camera is there at times. The interactions don’t feel performed or overly facilitated. Even the more formal interviews have a sitting-around-the-campfire feel to them. And the shots Fiore is able to get, gaining such intimacy with this mysterious individual, are remarkable: close ups of Shelby’s face with a gun up to his eye as he looks through the scope at a kid fishing on his territory; drone shots of the swamp, gators parting the waters; the glow of Shelby at work late at night, sitting in his “swamp mobile” tractor contraption, pulling hundred-ton logs up from the Pontchartrain.
Shelby’s line of work is a laborious one practiced by very few, but there is a certain wonder to it. Using his “swamp buggy”—a custom-built amphibious tractor—along with a system of boats and other equipment, he recovers old-growth sinker cypress logs that fell off rafts during the timber operations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The tragic effect of that industry was the decimation of old-growth cypress forests, meaning that such wood today is extremely rare and valuable. Often, Shelby pulls these logs from their resting place deep in the mud of Lake Pontchartrain.
And occasionally, he pulls up other, more mysterious relics of history. Fiore captures the moment in which Shelby recovers slabs of ancient wood that they quickly decipher as the side of an ancient sunken ship.
[Read about other 2025 documentary films featured in our "Film & Literature" issue.]
Fiore said that when he first started working on the film, he took Shelby’s stories of treasure with a grain of salt. But when Shelby began to reveal some of the artifacts he’s collected over the years, Fiore began paying attention. “In the end, you start to believe he probably does know where the stuff is,” he said. “There’s enough smoke there to know that, you know, I’m pretty sure there’s a fire.”
Shelby received its world premiere at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival in October. Visit shelbymovie.com to stay up to date on upcoming screenings and future streaming opportunities.
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