DIGGING OUT: Long after the water receded. |
All of Chris Hume’s films are created under the banner “Shoot and Run Productions,” and it’s more than just catchy. It’s also a guerilla film-making credo. “Get in, get the shot, get out,” is how Hume describes his modus operandi. “Don’t stop, not even if you’re getting chased by an angry mob.”
Hume has yet to contend with literal mobs, but has certainly encountered livid and suspicious people as he’s documented under-told stories from the nation’s moral and political heart. In his last film, Red State Road Trip, Hume took to the Middle American road after the 2004 Presidential election, for frank talk with the ordinary Americans out in W-land. His new film, Voices of Katrina, takes a similarly intimate look at another contentious chapter of recent American history. An chronicle of several Southern lives in the aftermath of the hurricane, it receives its premiere screenings at the St. Lawrence Arts and Community Center, produced by AmeriCo Productions and sponsored by Liberty News TV, on October 23 and 24, at 7 pm.
It was in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that Hume hit upon the documentary’s guiding concept, that of following several groups of people over the first year in the wake of the disaster. Among these groups are a black couple from Louisiana that takes shelter in North Dakota, a relief organization in New Orleans run by a former Black Panther, and a Mississippi mayor whose family relocated up here to Boothbay Harbor. Hume documents the struggles, reunions, and incredible stamina of these charismatic folks as they go about the slow process of recovery. “Between these intimate human stories, the bigger stories come through,” Hume explains. “The political screw-ups, the injustices.”
Over the course of the year in which Hume shot this film, he was most moved by what he calls the “indomitable spirit” of the people who graciously allowed him into their lives. Tommy Longo, the mayor of Waveland, Mississippi (which was essentially wiped off the map), continued to work for recovery down South even as his family waited far north in Boothbay Harbor. Remarkable efforts like this by so many folks, Hume says, continue in spite of the government’s help, not because of it. People are putting their communities back together on their own, and in a landscape that is still, in places, apocalyptically ravaged.
Hearing the stories of these survivors is important to understanding the continuing work of these people, and of the need that still remains. Should Voices of Katrina turn a profit, Hume will designate proceeds to benefit Common Ground Relief, a New Orleans group run by one of the folks featured in the film. Your own ticket to the premiere at the St. Lawrence helps benefit Katrina recovery, and also buys you some world-class New Orleans jazz by Justin Page and his Downeast Division.
