FALLING TOGETHER IN NEW ORLEANS: A Series of Video Vignettes

The trailer for Falling Together in New Orleans

Solo Journalist-Documentary Artist, Farrah Hoffmire was inspired by grassroots organizing and volunteer efforts in the weeks and months after Hurricane Katrina. She has traveled to New Orleans numerous times to create a solo work that is part art-vignette, part documentary film and part grassroots journalism.

In stark contrast to the failure and corruption stories that have dominated mass-media coverage, Falling Together introduces us to powerful people fighting to save lives, preserve culture and bring a sense of well-being back to New Orleans. Conceived as an ongoing, subscription-based platform to follow events in New Orleans as they unfold over the next few years, it also explores the ongoing complexities of rebuilding in areas of the city still severely damaged -- such as the Lower 9th Ward.  The film features music by Ani Difranco as well as some of New Orleans’s top musicians.

The film series has been screened at the following:

• Oral History Association national conference (Little Rock, AR)
• Langston Hughes African American Film Festival (Seattle, WA)
• Lake Eden Arts Festival (Asheville, NC)
• Zeitgeist Film Series (Tulane University, New Orleans)
• Hurricane Katrina Campus Media Project (worldwide 2007-2008)

Vignette 1: Lewis Taylor Is Always Home (released October 2006)

• We’ll meet Lewis Taylor, an elderly gentlemen and “displaced resident” as he finds his family and visits what once was his home, a small fishing village called Boothville. Boothville sits at the tip of Louisiana’s coastline, a place where Taylor spent his whole life farming and fishing. We follow Taylor along his journey as he accepts his fate with humor and insight.

Vignette 2: The Art of Falling Together (released April 2007)

• Witness grassroots groups, volunteers, and residents, as they rebuild threatened neighborhoods such as the Seventh and Ninth Wards immediately after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Unlike the millions who thought about it watching the story unfold on CNN, meet the people who dropped everything and traveled to New Orleans to see how they could help. It changed some so dramatically they could not leave.

Vignette 3: Emergency Communities

• Emergency Communities - Summer 2007 update.  Reacting shortly after the Hurricane in 2005, Emergency Communities set up the Made with Love Cafe in the devastated St. Bernarnds Parrish. OPP cameras visited EC in Winter 2005 - right after the storms and told thier amazing story in Vignette 2.  We visited EC again in the Summer of 2007 where they are still working hand in hand with the hardest hit areas of New Orleans. Now in the Lower 9th Ward, they face incredible odds but are buyoed by the altruistic efforts of volunteers and residents who treat each other as equals.

Vignette 4: Social Dress New Orleans

• Takashi Horisaki was working 20 hour days in the 100 degree heat when Farrah found him completing an art project like none other she had ever seen. As a project to raise awareness about the situation in the Lower 9th Ward he made a replica of the surface of a shotgun-style house in latex, then taking the replica to New York's Socrates Sculpture Park. Hear about the project and see a true artist devoted to a true cause.

• Music written and composed by Ani DiFranco Please visit: Righteous Babe

DR. LANCE HILL: AMERICAN CHARACTER

Dr. Lance Hill is the Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Researchat Tulane University. Dr. Hill worked as a community activist and labor organizer for 20 years before embarking on an academic career.

From 1989 to 1992, Dr. Hill served as the Executive Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism (LCARN), the grass roots organization that led the opposition to former Klansman David Duke’s Senate and Gubernatorial campaigns.Hill, one of the coalition’s founders, directed the organization’s extensive television, radio and direct mail campaigns.The New York Times and the New Orleans Times-Picayune credited LCARN with playing the leading role in Duke’s ultimate political demise.

In 1993, Hill co-founded the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University. Over the past 10 years the Institute’s tolerance education program-the most comprehensive project of its kind in the South—has provided training to more than 3,600 teachers from 785 schools in the Deep South. The program uses case studies of the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement to teach the causes and consequences of prejudice. With a geographic scope of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle, the Institute prides itself on successful implementing programs in rural and isolated communities that have been traditional strongholds of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups.

Dr. Hill also directs the Southern Institute’s cross-cultural communication training and research program, which teaches advanced skills to improve communication and collaboration among ethnic groups in the United States. Hill holds a PhD from Tulane University, where he has taught US History and Intercultural Communication.

His scholarly research field is the history of race relations and the radical right. He is the author of The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement(University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and "National Socialist Race Doctrine in the Political Thought of David Duke," in The Emergence of David Duke by Doug Rose (University of North Carolina Press, 1994). He has served as a consultant on several PBS documentaries on the radical right and the civil rights movement and has written extensively on racial politics in the South.

Dr. Hill resides in New Orleans with his wife of 30 years, Eileen SanJuan.

Music written and composed by Michael Houser (Door Harp album). Please visit: Houser Tribute

Emergency Communities

emergency communities from OPP and Vimeo.

An out-take from Vignette 2 - The Art of Falling Together. Emergency Communities was started in St. Bernard Parrish. This footage is from late 2005.

EMERGENCY COMMUNITIES SUMMER 2007

 

Emergency Communities in the Lower 9 from OPP and Vimeo.

Emergency Communities is a non-profit organization that employs compassion and creativity to provide community-based disaster relief. Since Katrina, they have operated four relief sites, served over 300,000 meals and 25,000 residents of the Gulf. emergencycommunities.org

They run entirely on volunteers and donations. 

The above clip (running time aprox. 17 minutes) is from June 2007 from the Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans. Emergency Communities set up thier first relief center in St. Bernards Parish in Fall 2005 (featured in Vignette 2)

Thanks to Katie Fogle and the St. Albans Church Youth Group and Volunteers for footage that was inspiring to edit and produce. One of the most exciting things about solo journalism is letting the stories tell themselves and this is one that does that so easily. As Louise says in the video "it is hard to get people to understand, but we will see what happens...". Yes we will. Thanks to everyone who makes Emergency Communities come true.