New Orleans // Current TV

HUGH LAURIE IS RELEASING A NEW ALBUM

British actor Hugh Laurie, star of TV series “House MD” will release his... more

tonyzomba
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27 days ago
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Les Blank Dies at 77: Created Lyrical Films of America’s Periphery

Les Blank’s sly, sensuous and lyrical documentaries about regional music and... more

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1 month ago
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Noah’s Art: Artist Noah Saterstrom on Art, Poetry and all that Jazz

In researching a recent story on the forgotten king of jazz – Buddy Bolden... more

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2 months ago
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“Beasts of the Southern Wild” Receives Four 2013 Oscar Nominations!

The nominations for the 2013 Academy Awards have been announced, and it was a huge day for the independent film “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which received four Oscar Nominations: Best Director (for Benh Zeitlin), Best Actress (Quvenzhane Wallis, at just nine years old), Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” is the award-winning first feature film directed by Benh Zeitlin and co-written co-written with playwright Lucy Alibar, whose play “Juicy and Delicious” provides its foundation. Zeitlin created the movie in collaboration with Court 13, the filmmakers’ collective that moved to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Previously, the film won the Caméra d’Or award at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered, the Grand Jury Prize at the 2012 Deauville American Film Festival, the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival’s Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature and the 2012 Seattle International Film Festival’s Golden Space Needle Award for Best Director.

Part dystopia and part revolutionary utopia, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is a visionary film that celebrates resistance, featuring people living in poverty who come together in interracial, inter-generational harmony. After a flood washes away most of “The Bathtub,” a poor and precarious patch of land south of New Orleans, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis, five years-old at the time of filming) and her father account for their remaining animals and neighbors, and attempt to survive, rebuild, and repair their world. They band together to create a post-Katrina communal life and they fight the system to avoid getting thrown into the sterile, controlled environment of a state-funded shelter.

This piece includes color photographs, a short film, two documentary shorts and a music video.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-receives-four-2013-oscar-nominations/The nominations for the 2013 Academy Awards have been announced, and it was a huge day... more

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4 months ago
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Truman Capote: A Sentimental Christmas Memory

Truman Capote's mother was not, according to her own testimony, emotionally... more

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5 months ago
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Weary of Hurricane Sandy? Watch This Tiny Boat Weather the Storms!

“Little Boat” is a bittersweet, sometimes heartbreaking minimalist... more

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7 months ago
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An Anthem to Survivors: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you've never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius. "Beasts of the Southern Wild" is one those rare films, the award-winning first feature film directed by Benh Zeitlin, created in collaboration with Court 13, the filmmakers’ collective that moved to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The film won the Caméra d’Or award at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered, the Grand Jury Prize at the 2012 Deauville American Film Festival, the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival’s Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature and the 2012 Seattle International Film Festival’s Golden Space Needle Award for Best Director.

Part dystopia and part revolutionary utopia, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is a visionary film that celebrates resistance, featuring poor people who come together in interracial, inter-generational harmony. After a flood washes away most of “The Bathtub,” a poor and precarious patch of land south of New Orleans, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis, five years-old at the time of filming) and her father account for their remaining animals and neighbors, and attempt to survive, rebuild, and repair their world. They band together to create a post-Katrina communal life and they fight the system in a variety of ways to avoid getting thrown into the sterile, controlled environment of a state-funded shelter.

Coming off his earlier award-winning short film, “Glory at Sea,” Zeitlin wanted to continue working on an expanded feature film set in the Louisiana bayou and to tell a story about a community making a final stand. The same theme and mythic, poetic feeling of “Glory at Sea,” clearly carries through in Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Like “Beasts,” “Glory at Sea,” concerned a southern Delta community endangered by a flood and focused on a young girl, who also served as the film’s narrator. “Glory at Sea” told of the aftermath of the Katrina flood, and a community’s Orpheus-like efforts to keep alive its old traditions and loved ones.

Fusing recent history and environmental concerns with a mythical quality, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” defies easy classification or description, instead forging a new path that firmly establishes director Benh Zeitlin as a bright new cinematic talent. Reviewers are speculating that both Zeitlin and young Quvenzhané Wallis could be nominated for Academy Awards.

This piece includes a number of color photographs and five videos, including the official trailer for "Beasts of the Southern Wild" and the acclaimed short film, “Glory at Sea.”

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/an-anthem-to-survivors-beasts-of-the-southern-wild/Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you've never heard of,... more

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8 months ago
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Slow-moving Hurricane Isaac hammering SE Louisiana and coastal Mississippi

Isaac is proving to be more a significant storm than originally expected as the region... more

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9 months ago
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Remembering Hurricane Katrina: Portraits of Tragic Loss

Today, the mayors and governors along the Gulf Coast issued dire warnings about Hurricane Isaac. Seven years ago, Katrina slammed into New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, as a strong Category 3 hurricane with sustained winds of 125 mph. More than 1,800 people were killed, most of them in Louisiana. On Tuesday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said Isaac had become a Category 1 hurricane with winds of 75 mph, which could get stronger by the time it’s expected to reach the swampy coast of southeast Louisiana. The latest projections showed Isaac making landfall at or near New Orleans late Tuesday or early Wednesday.

This week marks the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s ravages of New Orleans, a city that not long ago appeared to be completely lost. Only seven years have passed since rotting corpses were floating through the city’s streets, since hundreds of thousands of survivors sat in hotel rooms and shelters and the homes of relatives, finding out from news coverage that they had been forced to join the ranks of the homeless. The unbelievable devastation of New Orleans is almost beyond human comprehension. The virtually complete destruction of the entire city by Hurricane Katrina, the loss of huge numbers of lives, the ruination of the property and lives of so many, especially the poor and disadvantaged, is a tragedy of historically monumental proportions.

Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast with devastating force at daybreak on Aug. 29, 2005, pounding an area that included the fabled city of New Orleans and wreaking large-scale damages on neighboring Mississippi. In all, more than 1,700 people were killed and hundreds of thousands of others were displaced. Packing a terrifying punch of 145-mile-an-hour winds when it made landfall, the category-4 storm left more than a million people in three states without power and submerged highways even hundreds of miles from its center. The hurricane’s storm surge pushed a 29-foot wall of water ashore when the hurricane struck the Gulf Coast, which was the highest level ever measured in the United States. Levees failed in New Orleans, resulting in political and social upheavals that continue a half decade later.

Damage, costing billions of dollars, has made Katrina one of the costliest storms on record. In New Orleans, floodwaters from the breached levee rose to rooftops in the poorest neighborhoods, and in many areas residents were rescued from roofs of homes that had become uninhabitable. The hurricane’s roaring winds stripped 15-foot sections off the roof of the Superdome, where as many as 10,000 city residents had been forced to take shelter. An exodus of hundreds of thousands left the city, many becoming refugees, finding shelter with nearby relatives or restarting their lives in states as far away as Massachusetts and Utah.

This piece includes a number of color photographs, a photo-gallery and two videos.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/remembering-hurricane-katrina-portraits-of-tragic-loss/Today, the mayors and governors along the Gulf Coast issued dire warnings about... more