A good film festival is defined by its programming: diversity and inclusion play as much a role as does variety in all genres of filmmaking. The New Orleans fest distinguishes itself by also paying attention not only to local filmmakers but to local stories: topics that resonate with or were born from the city, the state, or the region. Nowhere is this as strong as in the documentary field. Here are a few films we loved.

The Neutral Ground

It is important to know what neutral ground means in the city of New Orleans. It describes the center divider  – usually grassy – that separates the two directions of traffic on a bigger street. During storms, citizens are advised to park their cars there to avoid flooding. But the neutral ground is often also the location for statues. When an organization called Take ‘Em Down Nola launched a petition in 2015 to the city and its then-mayor Mitch Landrieu to remove offensive confederate statues, those of warmongers, slave traders, and slave owners, it sparked a bigger debate about race in America.

Director C.J. Hunt, whose career started out in comedy, had originally planned to make a YouTube series with a comedy feel about this and started doing so when the petition began, in the summer of 2015, while he was living in New Orleans. However, he soon realized that the topic was too heavy for simple laughs, and changed paths. The doc he ended up making is eye-opening, stirring, at times satirical but also upsetting. The viewer can tell that he kept filming an evolving story.

Mayor Landrieu, a democrat (who interestingly was not even running for re-election) jumped at the chance to do the right thing with the story. His sincerity was demonstrated when he recounted off the screen the story of how a famous Black musician friend asked him how he would feel if he had been a Black man required to explain to his eight-year-old daughter why a slave-owning militarist deserved to be honored in a huge bronze likeness.

The film tells of three of the main statues that were removed, those of Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard, Robert. E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. But the fact is that New Orleans has well over 200 street names that would ideally need to change, too, a reality emphasized as the names scroll across the screen. And Suber’s question during the Q&A to the current democratic, African American mayor Latoya Cantrell who has not continued the work of her predecessor: “What about the other statues?” 

The director also smartly delves into the larger question of race relations in the South by joining a disturbing confederate re-enactment of the Civil War and traveling to other Southern cities.

Buddy Guy: The Blues Chases the Blues Away

Music is as much in New Orleans’ DNA as are food and cocktails. This film about blues guitarist Buddy Guy, a native son of Louisiana, is a beautiful testament to the roots of this genre. At one point in the doc, Buddy Guy comments that “you can’t sing the blues if you have not lived the blues”. This very personal story about a boy with a great gift, born in a small village called Lettsworth, centers as much on the man as on his music.

Co-director Matt Mitchener describes their plans when they first started: “We pitched a completely different film than we ended up making because we got approved right when Covid was hitting. We were gonna go on tour with (Guy), and all that got canceled. And so we had to go another way, and it became a much more personal story.” And probably, a much more interesting film.

We always think of music as the great equalizer, a space where Black and white create with each other on the same level. This is partially true, but the film leaves us with the heartbreak of knowing that one of the most talented people in the field would have been all but ignored by white audiences had it not been for the, mostly British, white music stars who made sure he got his place in history. Or as the director says: “He is every one of those famous musicians’ favorite guitarist. Everyone loves and respects and has learned from him. He is that quiet guy, but everyone from the Rolling Stones down credits him with being the best guitar player. Buddy himself is so humble he won’t even admit that he’s a musician. let alone the greatest guitarist. We had to talk to all these other people.”

“These other people” were people like Santana, Eric Clapton, John Mayor, Stevie Ray Vaughn.

In one of the most joyful scenes in the film, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards jump onstage at Buddy Guy’s club in Chicago and jam with the band. Thereby saving the club from going under.

100 Years from Mississippi

Mamie Lang Kirkland has seen it all. As a witness to an era of racial terror, she has lived through segregation, two world wars, and a civil rights movement that died with Dr. Martin Luther King, later to experience a rebirth of sorts with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Born in 1908 in Mississippi, Kirkland was seven, when her family fled the town, and ultimately the state, overnight. The family had been told that Kirkland’s father and his best friend were going to be lynched. Mamie never found out what crime her father had supposedly committed: probably, given the Jim Crow times, none. Married at 15 to a man she loved all her life, she bore eight children. When she was well over 100, her youngest son Tarabu Kirkland, upon finding a believed-to-be-lost newspaper article on the attempted lynching and realizing it referred to the story his mother had told the family, decided that Miss Mamie’s life story deserved to be preserved and began filming this documentary. Miss Mamie comes across as outspoken, hilarious, in full mental capacity, and the exemplar of a wise woman: “Don’t rush through life. Live life”, she says at one point. Through the film, her son keeps trying to convince her to go back to Ellisville, her birthplace, but she refuses at first. When she does go, the circle of her life is completed. “We showed my mother the final cut of the film in 2018. A few days after, she peacefully passed,” Tarabu Kirkland says. Mamie was 111 at the time. “She always maintained this level of grace and forgiveness,” her son says. “I’m not sure I could do that.”