Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?

4 Films to Remember pre-Katrina New Orleans By 20 Years After the Storm + MoMA Film Series

VIRTUAL TALK: I am proud to be doing a FREE virtual archival workshop + film screening on Thursday, August 7 at 6 p.m. ET /3 p.m. PT with Kinfolk Tech. It is free to attend but you have to sign up for the Zoom Workshop here.

I, like many native New Orleanians¹, bifurcate our lives pre and post Hurricane Katrina. The ‘once-in-a lifetime’ storm that ruptured New Orleans – put into worldwide focus its one-of-a-kind history as the site of political reckoning, cultural rendering, and unique racial hierarchical framework– and transformed the city into otherness overnight twenty years ago this month.

In the aftermath of the storm, my community was censured as an enemy of America’s promise– in the days’ after the August 28, 2005² storm, New Orleans was called America’s ‘Baghdad,’ and other deeply racialized epitaphs– as our very humanity was called into question, and the nation’s feigning responsibility for its hurt, poor, and disadvantaged was permanently abandoned.

This story taken from the Associated Press in the immediate aftermath (August 29, 2005) of the storm was one of many articles to shame people abandoned by a storm for going into stores; suggesting New Orleans is America’s ‘Baghdad.’

Questions like ‘How could they not know to evacuate? Who would leave their children on the roofs of homes? Why are people stealing from businesses?’ littered news and public opinion. Many of the post-Katrina community assassinations waged against New Orleans’s poor and Black assume the government—local and national— was designed to provide and fully protect them… it assumes that disaster will heal and harmonize America’s racial and social inequities… it assumes that America’s ‘heart’ and other magical thinking can save us from climate rapture and man-made engulfings.

I have been reflecting on Hurricane Katrina my entire life. Memory is imperfect, we are constantly calculating who, how, and what we are… measuring it against stories we’ve told, truths we’ve abandoned, or fantasies we’ve conjured. I am of this storm, it has shaped me–my optimism, willingness to believe in people-powered change, and imagination of the future.

I have attempted to distill my thoughts on the past, present, and future of the storm we waged and the storms to come into film curation. For New York’s Museum of Modern Art, I have co-curated a series on Hurricane Katrina, “When the World Broke Open: Katrina and Its Afterlives,” premiering August 26 - September 21. The series focuses on Hollywood’s narratives of New Orleans pre and post storm, documentarian’s vision of the city’s richness and lost, and the ways this storm has become a measure of who is protected in the face of natural disaster.

When the World Broke Open: Katrina and Its Afterlives
Curated by Maya S. Cade and K. Austin Collins
Museum of Modern Art, August 26 - September 21. 

Series highlights:

Les Blank's "Always for Pleasure" (1978) - August 27

Spike Lee's Katrina Docs -- "When the Levees Broke" and "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise" Playing in Full (!) Twice. (!) 

Treme (TV PILOT) - Following a conversation with star Wendell Pierce, creator David Simon, and me - September 6 

J.D.'s Revenge (1976) - A New Orleans-set Blaxploitation -- Sep. 6 & Sep. 13

Language fails to convey the feelings... Feeling without sustained action fails the people. If the people are failed, a community is, too.

Twenty years later, Katrina does not miraculously stand alone. From numerous storms engulfing the Carolinas, fires in California, flooding in New York City, and every natural and man made disaster fro and till, I am reminded that the rebuilding of New Orleans was only possible because of the people. As we reflect on 20 years post Katrina, here are some films³ on Black Film Archive to remember the New Orleans–and greater Gulf Coast– we lost:

Hurry Sundown (1967) dir. Otto Preminger

The Louisiana-shot melodrama is boiling over with racial tension as land—the selling and caring of it— comes to change the previously drawn color lines against a common class enemy. Starring Diahann Carroll, Robert Hooks, and Beah Richards, the overstuffed epic is Hollywood’s attempt to answer the ‘race problem’ that is boiling over outside of the dream factory.

Cane River (1982) dir. Horace Jenkins

“Cane River” is a charming love story set in the heart of Louisiana. Drawing on how colorism and class tensions shift the way of living for Black Southerners, Horace B. Jenkins’s only film is a socially penetrating film that will sweep you up into its loving gaze of Louisiana and romance’s promise.

Cajun Country (1991) dir. Alan Lomax

“Cajun Country” is an investigation into New Orleans’s unique racial— migration, colonization, cultural, and segregation— dynamics that created the cajun culture of Louisiana. With acuity, Lomax listens to the tune of the Native and Black music-makers that comprise the Cajun tune.

Home Movies: New Orleans

A panoramic view of 1950s New Orleans. Breaking through color lines, the camera is a visual guide of New Orleans as Black and white New Orleanians tend to their day’s doldrums, dreams, and visions across the great city.

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May you all keep your heart about you. Do you have a Hurricane Katrina memory? I would love to hear them in the comments. If you’re in New York during the MoMA series I curated, I hope you’ll join me.

1. very proud to be a 10th(!) generation New Orleanian.

2. No coincidence that Black Film Archive’s (8/26) anniversary is near Katrina’s (8/28). Ava DuVernay has a film that reflects on the fact that many monumental moments across Black American history happen on/around August 28.

3. Wanted to focus on films that aren’t in the MoMA series. :-)