A SAVORY TASTE OF NEW ORLEANS PREMIERES AT TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL ON APRIL 25
Faubourg Tremi: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans Tells Little-Known History
of Neighborhood that Bore the First American Civil Rights Movement
NEW YORK (March 27, 2008)Faubourg Tremi: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, the riveting tale of hope, heartbreak and history set in New Orleans' most fascinating neighborhood, takes viewers into a little-known but extraordinary part of American history. Five years before Hurricane Katrina hit, two native New Orleaniansone black, one whitewriter Lolis Eric Elie and filmmaker Dawn Logsdon, began documenting the rich living culture of the historic neighborhood, Faubourg Tremi. Then Hurricane Katrina hit, scattering their subjects and jeopardizing the project. Miraculously, their tapes survived the storm. The completed work, both celebratory and elegiac, takes viewers back to a New Orleans that is in danger of being lost forever. The film, whose executive producers are Stanley Nelson and Wynton Marsalis, will have its international premiere on April 25 at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan.
Guiding viewers through the neighborhoodfounded as a suburb (or faubourg in French) of the original colonial city the neighborhoodis New Orleans' Times Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie. Elie bought a historic house in Tremi in the 1990's in the wake of the crack epidemic. While renovating his dilapidated home, he becomes obsessed with the area's mysterious and neglected past.
Who knew that in the early 1800's, while most African Americans were toiling on plantations, free black people in Tremi were publishing poetry and conducting symphonies? Who knew that long before Rosa Parks, Tremi leaders organized sit-ins and protests that successfully desegregated the city's streetcars and schools? said Elie, who claims that jazz, the area's greatest gift to America, was born from the embers of this first American Civil Rights movement.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, today many Tremi residents are unable to return home and the neighborhood is once again fighting many of the same civil rights battles first launched there a hundred and fifty years ago. Faubourg Tremi: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans celebrates the resiliency of this community and how its residents managed to carve out a unique and expressive culture and history that would enrich America and the world.
The film, produced by Lucie Faulknor, Logsdon and Elie, will be shown on Friday, April 25 at 9:15 p.m. at the AMC Village VII, 66 Third Avenue at 11th Street. Further screenings will be held on Saturday, April 26 at 8:30 p.m., Monday, April 28 at 9:30 p.m. and Thursday, May 1 at 3:15 p.m. at the Village East Cinemas at 181 Second Avenue at 12th Street. The final screening will be on Friday, May 2 at 5:30 p.m. at 890 Broadway at 19th Street. For tickets go to
http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org/tff/tickets/.
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The Film
Running Time: 68 minutes
A co-production of Serendipity Films, LLC, Independent Television Service (ITVS), WYES-TV12 New Orleans and Louisiana Pubic Broadcasting (LPB) in association with the National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC).
The TEAM
Executive Producers: Stanley Nelson & Wynton Marsalis
Director Dawn Logsdon
Editors: Dawn Logsdon, Sam Green & Aljernon Tunsil
Writer: Lolis Eric Elie
Producers: Lucie Faulknor, Dawn Logsdon & Lolis Eric Elie
Cinematographers: Diego Velasco Bobby Shepard, & Keith Smith
Composer: Derrick Hodge
The SYNOPSIS
Five years before Hurricane Katrina hit, two New Orleanians, writer Lolis Eric Elie and filmmaker Dawn Logsdon, began documenting the rich living culture of the historic neighborhood, Faubourg Tremi. Their tapes miraculously survived the storm. Now the completed film takes us back to a New Orleans that is in danger of being lost forever.
Long ago, Faubourg Tremi was home to the most prosperous and politically active black community in America. Here black and white, free and enslaved, rich and poor cohabitated, collaborated, and clashed to create much what defines New Orleans culture. Gracefully combining pre- and post-hurricane footage and a wealth of never-before-seen archival footage, Faubourg Tremi: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans is a riveting tale of heartbreak, hope, endurance and haunting historic parallels.
Press Contact:
Cheryl Duncan
Cheryl Duncan & Company Inc.
office: 201-332-8338
cell: 917-981-1842
email:
cheryl_duncan@earthlink.net
Synopsis
Faubourg Tremi: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans is riveting tale of hope, heartbreak and resiliency set in New Orleans most fascinating neighborhood. Shot largely before Hurricane Katrina and edited afterwards, the film is both celebratory and elegiac in tone.
Faubourg Tremi is arguably the oldest black neighborhood in America, the birthplace of the Civil Rights movement in the South and the home of jazz. While the Tremi district was damaged when the levees broke, this is not another Katrina documentary. Every frame is a tribute to what African American communities have contributed even under the most hostile of conditions.. It is a film of such effortless intimacy, subtle glances and authentic details that only two native New Orleanians could have made it.
Our guide through the neighborhood is New Orleans Times Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie who bought a historic house in Tremi in the 1990s when the area was struggling to recover from the crack epidemic. Rather than flee the blighted inner city, Elie begins renovating his dilapidated home and in the process becomes obsessed with the areas mysterious and neglected past. The film follows the progress of his renovation, which eventually emerges as a poignant metaphor for post-Katrina reconstruction of New Orleans.
Irving Trevigne, Elies seventy-five year old Creole carpenter, is the heart and soul of the neighborhood and a born storyteller. Descended from over two hundred years of skilled craftsmen, he beguiles Elie with the forgotten stories behind Tremis old buildings. Other neighborhood chroniclers like Louisiana Poet Laureate Brenda Marie Osbey, musician Glen David Andrews and renowned historians John Hope Franklin and Eric Foner help bring alive a compelling and complex historical experience that gracefully combines pre and post hurricane footage with a wealth of never-before-seen archival imagery.
Long ago during slavery, Faubourg Tremi was home to the largest community of free black people in the Deep South and a hotbed of political ferment. Here black and white, free and enslaved, rich and poor cohabitated, collaborated, and clashed to create much of what defines New Orleans culture up to the present day. Founded as a suburb (or faubourg in French) of the original colonial city, the neighborhood developed during French rule and many families like the Trevignes kept speaking French as their first language until the late 1960s.
The film brims with unknown historical nuggets: Who knew that in the early 1800s, while most African Americans were toiling on plantations, free black people in Tremi were publishing poetry and conducting symphonies? Who knew that long before Rosa Parks, Tremi leaders organized sit-ins and protests that successfully desegregated the citys streetcars and schools? Who knew that jazz, the areas greatest gift to America, was born from the embers of this first American Civil Rights movement.
This film is imaginative, revealing, and disturbing. The images are unforgettable, reminding us of who we are and who we have been. Today many Tremi residents are unable to return home and the neighborhood is once again fighting many of the same civil rights battles first launched here a hundred and fifty years ago. Faubourg Tremi: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans celebrates the resiliency of this community and how they managed to carve out a unique and expressive culture and history that would enrich America and the world.
Directors statement
We are New Orleans filmmakers, one black and one white. With the failure of the federal levees after Hurricane Katrina, our entire city was transformed overnight into the symbol of all that has gone wrong in America, in particular its deepening racial and economic divide. Seared into the nations consciousness are images of desperately poor black people trapped on rooftops and denied the most basic protection of American citizenship. Those images have come to represent black New Orleans.
Our goal in making this film was to tell the story behind those images. We chose to focus on one New Orleans neighborhood, Faubourg Tremi, a historic community that like much of the old city is predominantly African American, poor, and steeped in distinctly un-American traditions. For us Faubourg Tremi is quintessential New Orleans. We wanted to capture the spirit of this place that has persevered in the face of great hostility for centuries and created a culture and history that enriched America and the world.
These days, character driven documentaries are all the rage. In editing this film, however, we chose not to structure our story around the personal dramas of our wonderful individual characters but to highlight the larger drama of community. We hope New Orleans itself becomes the character you laugh and cry with, and come to love.
We are both products of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in this city. Our parents were Civil Rights activists. We were each sent, along with our siblings, to integrate New Orleans schools Lolis to an elite all-white private school, Dawn to an inner city public school that was abandoned by white parents after desegregation. Our childhood memories are of picket lines, voter registration drives and dreams of a new New Orleans. In our film we chose to focus on an earlier 19th century Civil Rights Movement in New Orleans and the music and writing that was born of those dreams.
Today, theres another new New Orleans in the planning and a new generation of young Americans trekking South to help in the rebuilding. Many of the battles of the past are being fought again. In the course of making this film, the Tremi neighborhood was transformed from one of the most rooted communities in America to among the most uprooted. Before the hurricane, one of the things old people loved to tell us over and over was You cant possibly know where youre going if you dont know where youve been. Back then, this expression sounded to us like a simplistic clichi. After the flood, it became our mantra too. The history of New Orleans is littered with tragic paths not taken. But its also rich with tales of brave uprisings, interracial collaboration, endurance and creativity. Our hope is that this film becomes part of the discussion about how we as a city and a nation can move forward, drawing on the best from our heritage and learning from its mistakes, to help heal and rebuild New Orleans for all New Orleanians.
Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Eric Elie
BIOS
Executive Producers
Wynton Marsalis is a world-renowned jazz recording artist and Pulitzer prize-winning composer. A New Orleans native and jazz history expert, he is currently Artistic Director of Jazz at the Lincoln Center in New York.
Stanley Nelson, an award-winning filmmaker, has over 20 years' experience as a producer, director, and writer of documentary films and videos. Nelson's films include Jonestown: The Life & Death of the Peoples Temple, Emmy-award winning The Murder of Emmett Till, The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords, Two Dollars and a Dream: The Story of Madame C.J. Walker, (winner of the CINE Golden Eagle, and cited as the Best Production of the Decade by the Black Filmmaker Foundation), and many others. He is also a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
Director/Editor/Producer
Dawn Logsdon has produced and directed several award-winning short documentaries, including Tomboy and Theresa: A Grandmother's Journey, which have screened at festivals around the world and aired annually on local PBS stations. Dawn is a nationally acclaimed editor and has worked on celebrated projects for PBS, HBO, and Channel Four in England. She edited the 2004 Academy Award.-nominated documentary film, The Weather Underground, directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel and the Sundance Award-winning documentary Paragraph 175, directed by two-time Academy Award. winners Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. She was also the editor of the Emmy and Peabody award-winning program The Castro: Hidden Neighborhoods of San Francisco, which interweaves the many strands of that community's history, culture and politics. Most recently, Dawn co-directed and edited the documentary on the former Congresswoman, Lindy Boggs: Steel & Velvet; and was awarded an Open Society Institutes Soros Katrina Media Fellowship. As the daughter of a local historian, Dawn was reared at the dinner table on tales of New Orleans' forgotten past. She recently returned to her hometown, determined to weld together over fifteen years of experience in documentary filmmaking with a quest for understanding New Orleans, its people, and our culture.
Writer/Narrator/Producer
Lolis Eric Elie is a national award-winning metro columnist and accomplished author. For the past seven years, he has chronicled the heartbeat of New Orleans' neighborhoods thrice weekly for New Orleans' major daily newspaper, The Times-Picayune. A recognized expert on New Orleans food and culture, Lolis is the author of Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country, a book about the culture of barbecue. He recently produced a television documentary based on that book and has several other culinary documentaries in development. He is currently writing Of Bondage & Memory, a book on the enduring legacy of the slave trade on two continents. He is editor of Cornbread Nation 2: The Best of Southern Food Writing for University of North Carolina Press. As a producer for the Smithsonian Institute's Jazz Oral History Project, Lolis conducted interviews with many of New Orleans' elder jazz musicians. Lolis is a current Soros Katrina Media Fellow awarded by the Open Society Institute. He has master's degrees from the Columbia School of Journalism in New York and a Master's in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. He and his father live in the Tremi and have become key figures in the area's cultural renaissance.
Producer
Lucie Faulknor has over 20 years experience in arts administration. She has assisted Academy award-nominated documentary filmmaker, Dorothy Fadiman, and feature film director, Lynn Hershman-Leeson. Lucie produced Irelands first Women in Film and Video Film Festival in Dublin and developed and produced Artists Up-Close a series of lectures in San Francisco featuring Bobby McFerrin, Wayne Shorter, Sydney Pollack, Laurie Anderson, and many others. She has managed fundraising campaigns for a number of theater companies, including Marin Theater Companys season featuring the world premiere of Tennessee Williams' Spring Storm. Lucie has been the publicity director for the Dublin (Ireland) Fringe Theatre Festival, San Franciscos Working Women Theater Festival, the Irish Arts Foundation, 4 Non Blondes, and handled publicity for various independent musicians, artists, actors, and filmmakers. She has a Bachelor of Arts from San Francisco State University in Arts Management and completed all course work for a Masters degree in Nonprofit Administration from the University of San Francisco. She lived in New Orleans for three years and moved back to the Bay Area after Hurricane Katrina.
Cinematographers
Keith Smith is a Los Angeles-based cinematographer who brings to the project over twenty years of documentary and narrative experienceand a special eye for his hometown, New Orleans. Keith has shot numerous documentaries, such as the nationally acclaimed ten-part educational series Black Americans of Achievement, as well as a number of narrative feature films, including Luck of the Draw and Any Given Sunday. His work has been shown theatrically and on numerous television broadcast and cable stations, such as PBS, HBO, Black Entertainment Television and Lifetime Television. He has also won awards at international film festivals.
Diego Velasco was born in the United States and raised in Venezuela. He currently resides in New Orleans and Los Angeles. He has worked as the director of photography for various music videos, commercials and independent films including Tony Bravo and Mutiny. He has also worked on such feature films as The Insider, Double Jeopardy, Crazy in Alabama, My Dog Skip and Dracula 2000. His films have won more than 19 awards worldwide including being pre-selected for Oscar consideration. Velasco directed the first ever Latin American sitcom, Planeta de 6, for Venezuelan television. He is currently filming with Fox Broadcasting in Los Angeles.
Composer
Derrick Hodge is currently the bass player and a composer with Terrence Blanchards jazz band. He was the composer for Who The !@#$ Is Jackson Pollack? and has composed tracks for Spike Lees Inside Man, When The Levees Broke and other film works. He attended Berkelee College of Music and received a bachelors degree in Music (emphasis on jazz and composition) from Temple University. Hodge has performed and/or recorded with Donald Byrd, Kanye West, Jill Scott, Bootsy Barnes, Q-Tip, Terell Stafford, Mos Def, and many others.
Post-Production Sound
Larry Blake, a New Orleans native, has mixed and edited the sound for Steven Soderbergs Oceans Eleven, Oceans Twelve, Oceans Thirteen, Welcome to Collinwood, Full Frontal, Traffic, Waking Life, Erin Brokovich, The Limey, Out of Sight, Solaris, Coastlines, Kafka, Schizopolis, and Sex, Lies, and Videotape. He mixed, designed, and edited the sound for Faubourg Tremi at Swelltone Labs in New Orleans, Louisiana.
What People are saying
Its history come alive. I enjoyed every second. The music, the second-line dancing, the characters, are wonderfully presented. The camera catches many telling moments that reveal the pulse and texture of a very special place. The historical footage is tremendous. The tragedy of Katrina hits home hard. Sad as it is, we come out the other end feeling hope for the future and glad to have shared in such a rich history.
Les Blank, filmmaker
Flat out brilliant...this is a great piece of storytelling, filmmaking and testifying... It is also, arguably, the most poignant film ever made about New Orleans...
The New Orleans Tribune
A stunning and powerful historical experience. This film is imaginative revealing, and disturbing. The images are unforgettable, reminding us of who we are and who we have been. Even as Katrina lifted a veil from the deepening racial divide in America, Faubourg Tremi celebrates the resiliency and cultural resources of black New Orleans, how the people of he community held themselves together in the face of white hostility, and how they managed to carve out a unique and expressive culture and history that would enrich America and the world.
Leon Litwack, Professor Emeritus, University California
President of the Southern Historian Federation
Powerful piece of work on our beloved New Orleans! Don't miss it!
Cornel West, Princeton University
This film is a modern history book that perfectly captures the spirit and culture of Tremi - one of New Orleans great neighborhoods.
Marc Morial, President and CEO of National Urban League and former Mayor of New Orleans
I watched the film on Tremi and it just opened the floodgates. Really right onthe filmmakers tell it like it is...very accurate depiction of what has happened.
Aaron Neville, musician
A deep piece of workso powerful, compelling and devastatingbeautifully rendered.
Davia Nelson, NPRs The Kitchen Sisters
Just got back from a community screening of Faubourg Tremi: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans. I expected it to be good. It was great. I cant say enough good things about this movie. The film brought the old Tremi back to life and demonstrated that not only was it the birthplace of jazz, it was also the birthplace of civil rights in the U.S. This is not just a black New Orleans story, this is an essential AMERICAN story.
foodmusicjustice.com
Anyone still wondering what it might mean to lose New Orleans should see this powerful and poignant documentary Long before there was the Lower Ninth Ward, there was Tremi, probably the oldest, continuously existing black urban neighborhood in America today. So much of New Orleans's distinctive contribution to our politics and culture originated in this low-rise district just back of the French Quarter. Our jazz idiom, the Creole tradition of political dissent, the craftsmanship behind our vernacular architecture-all had roots in Faubourg Tremi
Lawrence N. Powell, History Professor, Tulane University; Co-Founder & President, Southern Institute for Education
Linear Mode
