Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans
2008, 68 minutes
Directed by Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Eric Elie
Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story Of Black New Orleans will have its world premiere at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival.
About the Film
Faubourg Tremé: 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 afterward, the film is both celebratory and elegiac in tone. Faubourg Tremé 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 Tremé 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.
Filmmaker’s Biography
Dawn Logsdon produced and directed two short documentaries, Theresa: A Grandmother’s Journey and Tomboy. She edited the 2004 Academy Award-nominated documentary The Weather Underground and the Sundance-winner Paragraph 175. She was living in New Orleans when the levees breached, flooding her house and neighborhood.
Lolis Eric Elie (b. New Orleans) writes thrice weekly on New Orleans neighborhoods for the Times-Picayune. He is currently writing Of Bondage & Memory, a book on the slave trade. Lolis is also a producer for the Smithsonian Institute’s Jazz Oral History Project. He lives in Faubourg Tremé where he is still fixing up his Creole cottage.
Filmmaker’s 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 nation’s 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 Tremé, 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 Tremé 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.
Click here to read an interview with Dawn Logsdon, Co-Director of Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story Of Black New Orleans
